History Literature / Blindsight

* TheWatson: {{Invoked}} and {{Deconstructed}} with synthesists like Siri, who make a career out of having concepts explained to him and then translating them into terms baseline humans can understand. This tends to irritate the transhuman super-geniuses who are forced to work with them, who assign them insulting nicknames like "chaperone" or "commissar", and can lead to problems if their simplification of reality ends up being an oversimplification.

* VerbalTic: Szpindel ends every other sentence with '[[CanadaEh eh]]?'. The author is Canadian.

** The ''Rorschach'' initially hides its presence from the ''Theseus'' by warping electromagnetic signals around it to appear as if they were passing straight through empty air. However, this technique is monodirectional and is bypassed by launching probes and mirrors at wide enough angles.

* TitleDrop: "Blindsight" is a real-life phenomenon where blind people, specifically ones blind from brain (and not eye) damage, can react to visual stimuli despite their subjective reports of blindness. Some theories believe that these patients are in fact still receiving and processing visual input, but their (impaired) conscious mind is unaware that they are doing so, and thus subjectively reports blindness. In the novel, this is used [[spoiler:as a metaphor for the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processing. The characters experience a kind of blindsight when their cognition is impaired by ''Rorschach'''s powerful magnetic fields. The Scramblers are suspected to be non-sapient beings for whom ''all'' sensation is blindsight. Vampires are implied to be similarly evolving toward non-sapience. And the fundamental horror of the novel rests in the final implication that non-sapient, unconscious cognition is evolutionarily superior and will dominate in the universe. Human awareness is portrayed as inherently self-destructive, as evidenced by the creation of the solipsistic cyberspace "Heaven".]]

* TitleDrop: "Blindsight" is a real-life phenomenon where blind people, specifically ones blind from brain (and not eye) damage, can react to visual stimuli despite their subjective reports of blindness. Some interpretations believe that these patients are in fact still receiving and processing visual input, but their conscious mind is unaware that they are doing so, and thus subjectively reports blindness. In the novel, this is used [[spoiler:as a metaphor for the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processing. The characters experience a kind of blindsight when their cognition is impaired by ''Rorschach'''s powerful magnetic fields. The Scramblers are suspected to be non-sapient beings for whom ''all'' sensation is blindsight. Vampires are implied to be similarly evolving toward non-sapience. And the fundamental horror of the novel rests in the final implication that non-sapient, unconscious cognition is evolutionarily superior and will dominate in the universe. Human awareness is portrayed as inherently self-destructive, as evidenced by the creation of the solipsistic cyberspace "Heaven".]]

* TitleDrop: "Blindsight" is a real-life phenomenon where blind people, assuming their actual eyes are not damaged, can sometimes avoid obstacles despite not being able to consciously see them. Some part of their brain is still processing visual input despite the normal vision part of the brain being damaged. In the novel, this is used [[spoiler:as a metaphor for the distinction between conscious and unconscious mental processing. The characters experience a kind of blindsight when their cognition is impaired by ''Rorschach'''s powerful magnetic fields. The Scramblers are suspected to be non-sapient beings for whom ''all'' sensation is blindsight. Vampires are implied to be similarly evolving toward non-sapience. And the fundamental horror of the novel rests in the final implication that non-sapient, unconscious cognition is evolutionarily superior and will dominate in the universe. Human awareness is portrayed as inherently self-destructive, as evidenced by the creation of the solipsistic cyberspace "Heaven".]]

* CannonFodder: When the crew has no other option but to go explore ''Rorschach'' in person, Siri has no illusions about his role in the enterprise.

* OurVampiresAreDifferent: Vampires turn out to have been an ancient HumanSubspecies adapted to prey on us. They existed millennia ago, before recorded history. Since they were predators, they had to have superior pattern-matching skills (all the tricks of autistic savants plus more) and general intelligence, better night-vision, and the ability to put themselves into suspended animation (since, being apex predators, they had to give our populations time to rebound else they would hunt us to extinction). Unfortunately, the super-intelligence comes at a cost: their super-charged pattern recognition tends to get overstimulated when [[WeaksauceWeakness intersecting right-angles take up too much of their visual field]]. Basically, their brain ''glitches out'' and they have [[BrownNote epileptic seizures]] whenever they see anything with corners-- thus explaining the origin of [[HolyBurnsEvil the myth about them being weak against the cross]]. When humans invented architecture, the vampires all died out. The modern-day resurrected vampires have to take "[[AppliedPhlebotinum Anti-Euclidean]]" drugs to enable them to survive because geneticists weren't stupid enough to remove the weakness.

* HumansAreSpecial: Downplayed and Deconstructed, given how baseline humanity has been rendered obsolete. However, with the discovery of [[spoiler: the aliens totally lacking in self-awareness, this means that humanity is uniquely ''unequipped'' to deal with the universe at large.]]

* ImprobableAimingSkills: [[According to Bates, the ''Rorschach'' was able to create an electric arc between itself and one of its skimmers with such precision that it was calculated to pass through Susan and create her fifth personality.]]