Talk:Blindsight (Watts novel)

Appallingly Bad Article

This article is positively rife with conjecture about the novel, treating various critic's guesses and interpretations as fact. Two quick examples:

"Within the novel, humans no longer engage in sex with other humans for pleasure, instead choosing to use virtual reality to find idealized and submissive partners" ...the birth rate has certainly plummeted in this fictional future, but many humans/transhumans still enjoy physical sex.

If I recall, during Siri's flashbacks with Chelsea he mentions that she, atypically, preferred real physical sex, and that she was annoyed/hurt that he created a virtual sim of her to have virtual sex with. Cloudswrest (talk) 00:21, 25 November 2014 (UTC)

"...a plot element near the climax of the story, in which the vampire captain is revealed to have been controlled by the ship's artifical [sic] intelligence for the entirety of the novel." No, not really. The AI apparently always had the capacity to control / override the captain's body, but any control it may have exercised before the novel's climax is purely conjectural.

I don't want to go on and on about this all day, but wow... citations supporting some of these statements simply refer to articles where various critics are *guessing* about the book's themes, at it's treated as fact. Sloppy, sloppy stuff. Reducing the article to a stub would at least be less misleading than leaving it in its current state,

24.240.73.170 (talk) 13:00, 23 November 2014 (UTC)

The Three Linguistic Ambiguities

Is there a citation for the source of the sentence about the linguistic ambiguities? I personally think the three are "lie", "annoying", and that the "cousins" are nieces/nephews or neanderthals - cousins in the familial sense vs. a "cousin" branch of humanity.

87.81.224.218 (talk) 22:33, 5 August 2014 (UTC)

Wow, this article sucks

Any thoughts on mentioning any characters in the story? I've seen more information about something listed on the side of a box of cereal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.185.85.58 (talk) 05:05, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

We from Wikipedia have to make sure that articles about genre fiction are as dissuasive and uninformative as possible to discourage people from calling them up.

We must guarantee that those sci-fi bastards are put into their place. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.250.182.229 (talk) 02:24, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Distribution

The book itself can be readily downloaded from the Authors website under The Creative Commons Licence. It is one of the few books that has been released this way - should this not be mentioned somewhere? User:Harbutt —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.71.50.108 (talk) 14:14, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Plot summary: non-sentient humans?

Last paragraph of summary goes: "which he eventually realizes is being overrun by a non-sentient offshoot of humanity, beginning to exterminate what may be the only spark of consciousness in the universe". Is that directly supported by book's plot or just a conjecture? I'm very curious about this, because I had a trouble getting through some of quite info-dense Watts' prose, so it's entirely possible I missed that part, but I can't really recall that all being said overtly. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.5.195.146 (talk) 22:45, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

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