'A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good' Charles Stross. Their crews can barely be called human, what they will face certainly can't. Two ships, Theseus and the Crown of Thorns, are launched to discover the origin of Earth's visitation, one bound for the outer dark of the Kuiper Belt, the other for the heart of the Solar System. Something out there talks – but not to us. Three hundred and sixty degrees of global surveillance: something just took a snapshot.īut from deep space, whispers. Sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin plunge into Earth's atmosphere – a perfect grid of falling stars screaming across the radio spectrum as they burn. For a man hiding in the Oregon desert is about to play a key role in the next stage of human evolution.įirefall is the omnibus edition of the novels Blindsight and Echopraxia.įebruary 13, 2082, First Contact. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.After an unexplained moment of surveillance by an alien intelligence no further contact has been made for twenty-five years. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. And you send a synthesist-an informational topologist with half his mind gone-as an interface between here and there. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell. Binding: Trade Paperback ISBN: 1250237483 Book Condition: New Publisher: Tor Trade, April 2020.
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