Fold Catastrophes by Peter Watts


Short story collection by one of my favorite authors.


Gut Feelings -- (5*) Laugh-out-loud brilliant. Perfect combination of Google-hate, gut-borne cognition programming, and violence investigation, corporation-style. The way it's set up and executed is pure cotton candy to me.


21 Second God -- (4*) I'm a huge fan of runaway tech and warning stories, but this hits several more sweet spots: technological hive-mind, intelligent catastrophes, and the simple fact that we are all, in the end, a bunch of depressed idiots trying to become something more than depressed idiots. Or, at least, this was my own personal interpretation that's still just one valid one among several in this story. Grief, withering, and possible transcendence are more. :)


Contracting Iris -- (3*) Body snatching via microbes. Pretty decent but ultimately forgettable, having been done before. A lot.


Defective -- (5*) Super nerdy first contact stuff in the same universe as Blindsight and Echopraxia. Black hole goodness, BFG's, sun colonization, and impossible conflict. It's depressing, but damn, it's accurate for all that. Hard SF goodness.


Giants -- (5*) Holy crap that's one hell of an imaginative visual/textual trip. Great characters, too. But it really puts the awe in the some. Don't get much SF like that anymore. Cool stuff. Would make one hell of a movie.


Test 4 Echo -- (4*) It's a clever and short thought experiment illustrating the difference between the survival instinct and how it COULD relate to an AI, and the converse. (What causes the survival instinct? Should we build it in, or is it a consequence of consciousness?) As well as being a cool little story on its own.


ZeroS -- (5*) All kinds of awesome. Not just a zombie-consciousness military story right out of Blindsight, but a killer tribute to David Bowie. And since I've been a huge fan of Bowie, the first thing I thought was that each subsection of this novella was a direct reference to Bowie's songs (and they fit, strangely enough, thematically). And I even played the songs in my head as I read.

It's just that cool.


Critical Mass -- (4*) A VERY Peter Watts kind of story. All subconscious SF, art, internal conflict, and an outright art installation destruction investigation. Wild stuff and very obviously him. :)


The Colonel -- (5*) This has just about everything I love in a story much bigger than itself. A standalone that has massive continuations in the Blindsight universe, a massive thematic continuation of this particular set of stories (hive minds), and a deeply human and visceral gut punch story all on its own. And worse, it makes me want to re-read the entire Firefall series again. With relish.


The Wisdom of Crowds -- (5*) Fantastic what-if exercise. And just as ugly as it would be in reality. So, what if a broad selection of humanity could vote a whole city off the world? What would the wisdom of the crowd vote? Muahahahahahahaha


Game Theory -- (5*) This one is courageous and more than a little disturbing on many levels. Crazy enough to have its MC a damnably guilty priest with Conrad's Syndrome, the entire story is placed in a dying Earth that has given up precisely because science has proven we live in a Simulation, even if it is god-like in scope. But Watts doesn't just give us a great setup. He forces us to really come to terms with what we REALLY believe.

Suffering, indeed.


I'm immensely impressed with all of the stories in this collection. Watts is fantastically motivated to weave and interweave all of these main themes in a hard-hitting tapestry, be it distributed intelligence, subconscious thinking, disassociation, or questioning existential reality. All of this would be brilliant even if it wasn't couched in equally excellent hard-SF that's as nerdy as it is gorgeous, but it is both.

Tons of meat and potatoes and rich, rich gravy.

I just wish so much more SF could be like this. Pushing boundaries, asking real questions, being excellent for excellence-sake.

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