I want to warn you upfront, the acknowledgments section at the back is one of the funniest things I’ve read attached to a novel this bleak, Watts basically admits he wrote a book full of unlikeable people on purpose and dares you to keep reading anyway. I did, in about two sittings, and I’m still turning bits of it over weeks later.

The setup is a first contact mission crewed by people who barely qualify as baseline human anymore, a linguist with surgically induced multiple personalities, a biologist wired into so much hardware he’s mostly machine, a pacifist soldier, and captaining the whole thing, a resurrected vampire, because in this universe vampires are a real predatory subspecies with a plausible biological explanation and a very specific weakness for right angles. Our narrator, Siri Keeton, had half his brain removed as a kid and now reads people for a living without actually understanding them, which turns out to be the perfect lens for a story that’s ultimately asking whether intelligence requires being conscious of anything at all. That question is the real plot, honestly, the alien encounter is just the delivery mechanism for it.

It is a hard read, jargon heavy, technical, no hand holding, and I saw plenty of people bail around the hundred page mark because Watts genuinely will not stop to explain a term for you. Stick with it. There’s a moment past the halfway point where a throwaway line about metabolic cost of self awareness reframes everything that’s happened so far, and I actually said something out loud to an empty room. The Rorschach sequences, the ship itself as an alien structure you’re never fully shown, stayed with me longer than most fully described settings do.

Where it costs points for some readers is exactly what makes it work for me, the cast is deliberately hard to love, Sarasti especially, and if you need to root for someone this might not be your book. I did not need that. Five stars, and it’s the smartest, coldest first contact novel I’ve read.