Blindsight

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by the Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It won the Seiun Award for best novel in Japanese translation and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Locus Award.

The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian object named Burns-Caulfield that has been found transmitting an unidentified radio signal, and their subsequent first contact. Since the object is not communicating with Earth, the expedition has to proceed without knowing whom or what it is speaking to.

The novel explores themes of identity and consciousness, which is why the crew includes a linguist with multiple personalities whose brain has been surgically altered for the task. The first contact is with something that does not answer, and the expedition's problem is that the object's silence cannot be read as either hostility or indifference. The crew sent to it includes specialists whose modifications are part of the book's argument about what thinking is. The expedition is a first contact in which the other side has already acted, since sixty-five thousand objects burned in Earth's atmosphere before anything was answered.