andrew w. moore | reading

I read this one while traveling back from Mexico City. Peter Watts has kindly made the entire book available for free as a PDF on his website. Having finished the book, I’m not sure how much I care for the main character/narrator, but this was an interesting book. A moment that’s striking is that the characters encounter an entity that they’re able to communicate with, but in today’s parlance, it’s essentially a language model. The characters spend some time interacting with it, eventually concluding that it can’t meaningfully communicate with them (despite being able to produce human language). Given that this book was published in 2006, it’s amusing to see this play out as a reader in 2026. You could say the story is about first-contact, but I think it’s also reasonable to call it a work of cosmic (and psychological) horror. This book is a cold reminder that we can’t assume the consciousness of other potential entities (if it exists at all) will be something familiar to us.