Patrick Whitmarsh. 7/2016. “
"'Imagine you're a machine': Narrative Systems in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia".” Science Fiction Studies, 43, 2, Pp. 237-259.
AbstractPeter Watts is a relatively new figure in the field of science fiction, and his recent work has presented the literary community with a refreshingly innovative take on the ontological question of the human. Watts's critique of anthropocentrism, however, exceeds the compelling and sometimes disturbing thought experiments he depicts in his fiction; beyond the novelty of their content, Watts's recent novels Blindsight (2006) and Echopraxia (2014) attack the values of humanism at the level of narrative form. This essay argues that the relationship between these two texts is far more complex than prequel and sequel, and that their combined structure calls into question the rationale of narrative theory (as it has been practiced in literary studies), and even the production of meaning itself, by reconfiguring narrative as a super-intelligent evolutionary system. Ultimately, Watts's science-fictional project forces literary criticism and theory to reconsider the following relations: a) that between perspectival stability and narrative meaning, and b) that between narrative structure and the discursive demands of science fiction