This is an excellent recommendation! I read Blindsight earlier this year. Easily one of my favorite sci-fi novels. It and Canticle for Leibowitz are in a class by themselves when it comes to sci-fi that deals with "philosophical" issues.

I'll check out The Freeze-Frame sequence next, thanks! First I just need to finish Consider Phlebas, which I'm finding pretty weak.

Transference is also on the to-do list. Watts says it is almost diametrically the opposite, intellectually, of Blindsight, but he also praises it.

The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the Sunflower series. While different, they have the same alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more chilling.

It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"), two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I believe.

I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely concurrent one. There's a Portia connection there too, by the way.

Consider Phlebas is one of my favourite Banks novels, but I know many people dislike it. If this is your first Banks book, don't write off Banks completely. Finishing Phlebas is a great stepping stone to read Look to Windward, which I personally think is Banks' best Culture novel.

What's Transference? The Ian Patterson book?

Sorry, my mistake: the title is Permanence. Author is Karl Schroeder. If I remember correctly (and clearly my memory isn't to be trusted), Watts says in the afterword of Blindsight that he violently disagrees with Schroeder, or the perspective Schroeder offers, in that book, but I believe he recommends it as a rich exploration of many of the issue Blindsight explores.

Thanks for the write up. I'm completely sold on Sunflower series, and will probably read it next. It sounds very promising -- and probably short enough that I can slip it in between books 1 and 2 of the Culture series.

Thanks also for the encouragement to stick with Banks, too. I'll try. I'm not sure I'll be able to last for six full books though. The storytelling in Consider Phlebas -- which I'd call action-adventure sci-fi maximalism -- isn't working all that well for me. There's so much technobabble. There are so many lasers. So much ink is spilled filling out the world just for the sake of it. It's a massive overload and baroque overdose of sci-fi tropes. So far the most interesting episode has been, I think, the main character's interaction with the shuttle on the island.

I think that Blindsight is a much tighter story with great horror (existential or otherwise) elements, and the consciousness themes were outstanding.

I liked Echopraxia, but the concept of the god-virus is not as fleshed out. Still the treatment of Portia spiders by itself make the book worthy of a read.

After reading your comment, I visited a synopsis of Echopraxia, because, I realized, I could remember almost nothing of it -- only a few snapshots of a space station and vampiric predation. Turns out it left almost no imprint on my brain. Blindsight is, I agree, much tighter (and thus, for me apparently, more memorable). Looking back on Echopraxia, I wonder whether it suffers, as Children of Time*, I think, does, from trying too hard to expand its established universe.

The god virus really is a fun idea -- more of Watts' one-man war on the tree of life (not only is God not at the top some metaphysical/ontological hierarchy; it's at the very bottom) -- but, in retrospect, I think you're right that it's not as well developed as it could have been or maybe needed to be.

Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this author.

Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.

Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim. It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture. There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans — the set pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all there in later novels.

He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie" book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix — which explains what happened to the characters afterwards — that none of it actually mattered in the end. This poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel set about 800 years later that examines the long-term consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of the Culture books are about the consequences of war and the desire to avoid it at all costs.

Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-tag population has descended into a medieval class inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks' most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-like simpleton who writes phonetically á la Riddley Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between the warring classes. Shades of China Miéville and William Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of the dead.

I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars. Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Context_Prob...

I know this isn't the kind of reply people usually offer on HN, but I do want to say: you are indeed on a roll. I've thoroughly enjoyed this and your other comments, have read them several times, and noted the authors and titles you suggested, putting them high on my to-read list. The judgments you've offered in the thread have been refreshing, sharp, and just a delight to read. Thanks again for the write-ups!

Thanks for the kind words, hope you like my recommendations!

player of games is a great starting point

Blindsight is remarkable for its exploration of what intelligent life without consciousness might be like.

For me personally I was amazed that one of the lead characters is a vampire. I'm completely burned out on vampire stories yet Watts made one I very much enjoyed. Even if you're also bored with vampires, I recommend you try this book.

I didn't understand the vampire thing. That seemed like the least realistic part of the story.

Oh, man, I love the vampires, realistic or not.

They're a hominid and belong to our species but are completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic, evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear and awareness of being viewed as little more than a potential meal are baked into his biology.

Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient, autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were prey animals. We become little more than flighty, paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our biology.

It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a completely novel (as far as I know) approach to undermining the notion of humanity's specialness, highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in a very different way.

Good call. That said, it was only on a second reading of each, a few years after the first, that those two books clicked for me.

The sunflower cycle (which FFR is part of) is positively optimistic compared to the rifters universe. Which is also a great read.