Peter Watts - Firefall

But given this current state of the art, one of the more indigestible nuggets Echopraxia asks you to swallow is that eight decades from now, people will still buy into such an incoherent premise—that as we close on the twenty-second century, we will continue to act as though we have free will.

In fact, we might behave that way. It’s not that you can’t convince people that they’re automatons; that’s easy enough to pull off, intellectually at least. Folks will even change their attitudes and behavior in the wake of those insights [136] Davide Rigoni et al., “Inducing Disbelief in Free Will Alters Brain Correlates of Preconscious Motor Preparation: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not,” Psychological Science 22, no. 5 (May 2011): 613–618, doi:10.1177/0956797611405680. —be more likely to cheat or less likely to hold people responsible for unlawful acts, for example. [137] Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and C. Nathan DeWall, “Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 260–268, doi:10.1177/0146167208327217. , [138] Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,” Psychological Science 19, no. 1 (January 1, 2008): 49–54, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x. But eventually our attitudes drift back to pre-enlightenment baselines; even most of those who accept determinism somehow manage to believe in personal culpability. [139] Hagop Sarkissian et al., “Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?,” Mind & Language 25, no. 3 (2010): 346–358, doi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01393.x. , [140] Wasn’t it Joss Whedon, in one of his X-Men comics, who stated that “Contradiction is the seed of consciousness”? Over tens of thousands of years we just got used to cruising at one-twenty; without constant conscious intervention, we tend to ease back on the pedal to that place we feel most comfortable.

Echopraxia makes the same token concessions that society is likely to. You may have noticed the occasional reference to the concept of personal culpability having been weeded out of justice systems the world over, that those dark-ages throwbacks still adhering to the notion are subject to human rights sanctions by the rest of the civilized world. Brüks and Moore squabble over “the old no-free-will shtick” back at the monastery. Adherents to those Eastern religions who never really took free will all that seriously anyway have buggered off into a hive-minded state of (as far as anyone can tell) deep catatonia. The rest of us continue to act pretty much the way we always have.

Turns out we don’t have much choice in the matter.

PETER WATTS is a science fiction writer and a reformed marine-mammal biologist. He is the author of the Rifters trilogy, a winner of the Aurora, Hugo and Shirley Jackson awards and a Locus, Sturgeon and Campbell award nominee. Watts lives in Toronto.

Find out more at: www.rifters.com

Starfish

Maelstrom

Behemoth published as two novels:

Behemoth: ß-Max / Behemoth: Seppuku

Crysis: Legion

Blindsight

Echopraxia

Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes

The Island and Other Stories

Beyond the Rift

‘It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade… If you read one SF novel this year, make it this one’

‘A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good.’

‘State-of-the-art. Grabs you by the throat from page one.’

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Blindsight first published in the USA in 2006 by Tor, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Echopraxia first published in the USA in 2014 by Tor, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

This combined edition Firefall , containing the works Blindsight and Echopraxia, first published in hardback in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd.

Blindsight Copyright © Peter Watts, 2006

Echopraxia Copyright © Peter Watts, 2014

Firefall Copyright © Peter Watts, 2014

The moral right of Peter Watts to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN 9781784080457

Hardback ISBN 9781784080464

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http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

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