it ships a bibliography

the vampire is the silliest object in the book and watts still makes it work by treating it as a solved engineering problem instead of a monster. everything else is disciplined.

what i actually took away: the chinese room material isn't decoration, the whole crew is a set of experiments on whether self-awareness is doing anything or is just expensive. siri keeton as a narrator who processes rather than understands is the cleanest formal choice in it, and the prose gets colder as he gets better at his job, which is deliberate.

the notes and references at the back run to something like 140 citations and they are real citations. i've chased about a dozen so far. metzinger, the blindsight literature the title comes from, the split-brain work, the stuff on attentional blink. a novel that expects you to check it is a novel i'll take seriously.

against: the action sequences are close to unreadable on a first pass, and i think that's a craft failure rather than a considered choice about damaged perception. rorschach never resolves for me geometrically either. read it twice, still couldn't draw the thing.

1. losing a point for the fight scenes and nothing else.