Echopraxia, or How I Learned to Stop Understanding and Just Keep Reading

Read most of this in the chart room between admissions, which is not how a book like this wants to be read, in six minute chunks with a call bell somewhere in the back of my head. Echopraxia follows on from Blindsight, sort of, same universe anyway, and Watts writes like he’s daring you to keep up. I mostly couldn’t. Bruks the biologist gets pulled into a desert cult of Bicamerals, brains fused into something like a hive mind, chasing the last signal from the ship in the first book, and there are vampires, resurrected on purpose, because someone decided that was worth doing. It kind of is, honestly.

The appendix has something like a hundred and forty footnotes, I didn’t count, but more than one reader apparently did, and that tells you the register we’re in here. Faith gets treated like a virus, science like another kind of belief, and there’s a line, “the switch cannot flip itself,” that I wrote on a sticky note and stuck to my locker for a while. What I remember losing, more than once, was the ship itself. Crown of Thorns, it’s called, and I never got a clear picture of it, no real sense of where anyone stood in relation to anything.

Opinions on this one split hard, somebody compared it to Marmite, which, fair. I didn’t love it the way I loved Blindsight. But it’s the kind of book that makes you feel a little stupid in a useful way, like reading a chart from a specialty you don’t work. I went back through twice. Still not sure I have all of it.