Blindsight vs. War Against the Rull

Blindsight was written by Peter Watts and published in 2006.  It's a novel about a ship sent from earth to have a first contact with an alien species.  It's much like the first Alien movie (that's a compliment), with 300+ I.Q. Vampire for a Captain and a crew of misfits and sociopaths; the crew is as monstrous as the aliens they were sent to investigate.  Mr. Watts is a marine biologist, so the alien life forms are very smartly designed and fascinating to read about.  This is a hard science fiction novel with a strong biology foundation and some of the ideas covered are:  the science of linguistics, the evolution of empathy, vampire biology, theories of vision, alien anatomy, and physiology.  A main theme that runs throughout the novel is that of "Blindsight," about how sometimes you can't see something that is right in front of your face:

     "Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued.  "We don't really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses.  Everything else is just a peripheral blur, just...light and motion.  Motion draws the focus.  And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton?  Saccades, they're called.  Blurs the image, the movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just...shuts down between pauses.  It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an...an illusion of continuity in your head."
     He turned to face me.  "And you know what's really amazing?  If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just ...ignores it.  It's invisible."

This is some smart (REALLY SMART) and creepy Science Fiction. Watts keeps the suspense high throughout; this is a great, hard to put down read for a dark winter night.

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War Against the Rull was written by A.E. Van Vogt and published in various magazines and book forms from 1940-50.  I started reading it immediately after writing the Blindsight review, and noticed many similarities.  I compared Blindsight to the A.E. Van Vogt inspired movie Alien; I should have compared Blindsight to A.E. Van Vogt's War Against the Rull, and will do so here.  War Against the Rull will be now known as WATR.
(Spoiler alert.)  (Really.)  So, let's compare and contrast these novels:

ALIEN VILLIAN:
Both books feature humans fighting against aliens that control the electromagnetic spectrum:  WATR describes the aliens (Basically segmented worms in appearance) that "possess the amazing ability to alter and control certain electromagnetic waves, including the visible spectrum, with the cells of their bodies--an inheritance from the chameleon-like worms from which they are believed to have evolved."  That's it, that's the info, and then Van Vogt moves right along to the adventure stuff.   

Blindsight, on the other hand, gives page after page of incredible scientific detail, a dissection, as well as over 100 footnotes to reinforce the hard science of it all.  The "scramblers" as they are called (basically multi-jointed arms from a central mass; kinda like an intimidating starfish, or octopus,  in appearance) are basically a biologist's dream come true: "The same thing applies to the eyes.  Hundreds of thousands of eyes, all over the cuticle.  Each one is barely a pinhole camera, but each is capable of independent focus and I'm guessing all the different inputs integrate somewhere up the line.  The entire body acts like a single diffuse retina.  In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity."

TREATMENT OF ALIEN VILLIAN:
In WATR, when the Rull are captured, they are killed; this attitude is mainly prevalent due to a a failure of diplomacy.

In Blindsight, when the Scramblers are captured, they are tortured ruthlessly, for the sake of "gathering intelligence."   (Then they are also "exterminated", though their fate remains ambiguous...in an intergalactic suicide anti-matter bombing mission...)  I realize there hasn't been a film made of this yet, (but if there was it could be sooo great; better that Tarkovsky, another Kubrick perhaps?)  Sequel anyone?

EXISTENTIAL SITUATION:
In WATR, "Human beings have created what they call civilization, which is in fact merely a material barrier between themselves and their environment.  The barrier is so complex and unwieldy that merely keeping it going occupies the entire existence of the race.  Individually, man is a frivolous, unsuspecting slave, who spends his life in utter subservience to artificiality and dies wretchedly of some flaw in his disease-ridden body.  And it is this arrogant weakling with his insatiable will to dominance that is the greatest existing danger to the sane, self-reliant races of the universe!"

In Blindsight, Scramblers "were the norm.  Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence.  And we--we were the flukes and the fossils.  We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores."

MAIN CHARACTER:
In WATR, Jamieson is a standard hero-type; brave, quick-witted, charismatic, has great moral fiber, can keep a secret, etc.  Most importantly, he tries to make allies and befriend every race he comes into contact with, eventually earning the title "Administrator of Races" and becomes the great unifier of the galaxy.

In Blindsight, the main character Siri had half of his brain removed and possesses absolutely no empathy whatsoever.  Ostracized by his fellow crew members, he is a spy, a player, and the opposite of Jamieson, the WATR protagonist.  Similarly, both characters injure their right hands in their respective books...this means absolutely nothing, yet Modernmoon digs the coincidence...

THE STRUGGLE:
The struggle in both novels isn't about the physical struggle involved in traversing great distances, or surviving in a life support coffin through light years of travel, or even being brought back to life in the ship's infirmary 6 times; no those are the Mechanics of Science Fiction; the Struggle is: to overcome Mind Control.  In WATR,  "With a desperate will, he fought to retain his senses a moment longer.  He strived to see the lines again.  He saw, briefly, flashingly, five wavering verticals and above them three lines pointed to the east with their wavering ends.  The pressure built up inside him, but he still fought to keep his thoughts self-motivated."

In Blindsight, "But it's not in charge, You're not in charge.  If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you."  Who is in control here? It really is the blind leading the blind?  What exactly is nature?  Is kamakaze the norm to determine the outcome of a struggle in nature??

CONCLUSION:
In WATR, Jamieson's attitude of  "good will towards men" (and aliens) wins him many allies that eventually become indispensable to his final goal of ending the War against the Rull.  He actually even earns the respect of the Rull, and they go far away to another galaxy.

In Blindsight, Siri ends up hurtling through deep space a light year away from Earth, en route to "bear witness" to the fate of the crew and the first contact with the Scramblers.  Turns out, their whole mission was totally dictated by their ship's Artificial Intelligence computer program, and they were sent to meet the Scramblers, get some info, and wipe them out of existence with a preemptive strike that nobody knew about.  Even the Vampire Captain was just a figurehead of fear, there because the crew "disliked taking orders from machines."  The ship was in charge the whole time.  The crew was used, the Aliens slaughtered; scramblers take a hostage/specimen just like the crew from Earth did......the end?

MODERNMOONMAN:
Perhaps these two novels could be mirrors held to society, and that from them, and a comparison of their differences, we could glean some insights into some real world attitudes...Do we need these two novels to do this?  Probably not.  But we will here; sometimes fiction is only as good, (like anything else), as the thoughts and content that you bring to it; the lens that you look at it through...  Perhaps these Science Fiction tales can be a comment on WW2, The Holocaust, 9-11, War (in general), Guantanamo Bay, torture, free will, following orders, as well as a look at the differences in  American Attitudes towards International and Domestic Relationships (Race, Rulls, Blacks, Scramblers, Gays), from the 1940's to the present day (Science Fiction can do something?  How?  It's so white...too white...smells like privilige...entitlement...and where are the women?  (plenty of green)  where are the blacks?) o.k. with some Blindsight Perhaps we could somehow decode the differences between similar situations separated by mere decades, we could see a sea change in ourselves, and be able to say, see?  It WAS different then, before we were born, it was a simpler time, and it was easier to be heroic...

But NO, it wasn't easy, ever;  In our time we had 9-11, in Van Vogt's time they had the Holocaust, so it never was any better, was it?  So you can't just come along and say:  and now, it's a huge mess from the top on down just a mass of corruption, no matter what you do there is no real authority, no real responsibility, just the adherence to the program that holds the strings in a world of puppets where "Truth never matters.  Only fitness." It was always this way, it will probably always be this way: Somewhere, somebody is "en route to extinction"-... Modernmoonman had to cross a desert to get here but:  THE TRUTH AT LAST!!

"You think you'd be able to fight the strings?  You think you'd even feel them?" How do you even know you've crossed the line (a moral line) if you can't even see it?  Clear vision matters.  The will to see clearly, matters.  The way we act matters.  This is the theme in War Against the Rull, as well as Blindsight:  "They told you you were the stenographer and they hammered all of these layers of hands off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn't you?  Had to work out the problem on your own.  The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself."  Cunningham shook his head.  "Siri Keeto.  See what they've done to you."  He touched his face.  "See what they've done to us all," he whispered...

Political content in Science Fiction is not just wishful thinking; it's in the text!: (from Blindsight:)

"You decode the signals, and stumble:
I had a great time.  I really enjoyed him.  Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome--To fully appreciate Keysey's Quartet--They hate us for our freedom--Pay attention, now--Understand.  There are no meaningful translations for these terms.  They are needlessly recursive.  They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisin by chance." 

Note the "They hate us for our freedom..."  This novel is from 2006; Watts puts it in there :

I had it.  The "Big Picture":  "You rationalize, Keeton.  You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them.  Incremental evidence is never enough for you.  You hear roomers of holocaust; you dismiss them.  You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad.  Temperatures rise, glaciers melt--species die--and you blame sunspots and volcanoes.  Everyone is like this, but you most of all.  You and your Chinese Room.  You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first." I had it, "The Big Picture," I knew who was in control, I saw the strings, I read between the texts, between the lines of 2 fictions...I have had my vision...and now it's gone...

p.s.s.: This a bonus text from Blindsight:

"Evolution has no foresight.  Complex machinery develops its own agendas.  Brains--cheat.  Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music.  The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art.  Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection.  Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism.  It begins to model the very process of modeling.  It consumes ever more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations.  Like parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself.  Meta processes bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I."