Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor by Peter Watts. Book review

The title of this book really lets a reader know what they’re in for in the spirit of “It does exactly what it says on the tin”, when they pick up this book.

Peter Watts is indeed a very angry man and he knows how to express himself with outstanding panache.

On an initial reading of what are tidied up blog posts, your first impression is of a string of rants, and some quite extreme at that.

But when you put the book down, dropping it like a hot brick, the arguments linger (nay fester) and you find yourself compelled to take a look at them again, albeit opening the pages cautiously, lest something leap out and take a chunk out of you.

This is when you begin to grasp the genius of a man whose science fiction requires you to bend your mind into novel contortions before you can begin to get a glimmer of Watts’ conceptual gymnastics.

There is a great element of “made you think” to the erudite commentary and argument made regarding even the most esoteric of academic papers, which conventional researchers consider are not so much at the edge of science as drifting through an unidentified void.

This will be a book for some to fling with exasperation against the nearest wall, or treasured as something to return to because of what it tells us about ourselves.

Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor was courtesy of Tachyon Publications via NetGalley.