Blindsight

Jargon-loaded sci-fi book with a bouncing, complex narrative steam. I wouldn’t recommend if you’re not a super sci-fi person. It was a task

The end gave me shivers, tough to follow but when your brain is able to come up with a bit of imagery for the text you're reading or listening to, it really stands out as a thought provoking book and something you won't soon forget.

Amazing book!! If you're a Sci-Fi enthusiast, you'll love it!!

A cracking, compelling story coupled with honestly challenging questions about the nature of consciousness and sentience, society and evolution... this is SF at its best.

This was a tough read, and although personal matters definitely interfered with my concentration, I think it would have been tough regardless. I don't read much hard sci-fi, and there were a lot of points (especially early on) where I wished the author were giving readers just a little bit more help putting the pieces together and offering connections. The read became more engaging as I got into the second part of the book and characters became a bit more familiar, to the point that I ended up reading the second half of the book basically in one sitting as the momentum picked up more and more. This is one of those rare books I may try to read again someday, but I doubt I'll go on to the sequel. Some of Watts' writing is so fantastic that it alone is worth the ride here, and there were scenes/discussions/themes that truly drew me in, but on the whole, I'm left with more of a general feeling for the novel than a true understanding of what I just read, and reading the book was a bit more work than pleasure.

It was good, finished far too suddendly, it reminded me a lot of Destination Void by Herbert, all in all a not that bad book

Found this to be a bit needlessly cryptic at the beginning (bit like William Gibson), but picked up the pace and some clarity as it went on. Some really interesting ideas about extended cognition and sentience / free will embedded in an action story with aliens and explosions.

This sort of reminded me of the 2nd and 3rd book in the Annihilation trilogy - lots of amazing ideas, but I had a really hard time following some of the narrative and it made me want to see a movie or tv version of it. There are some really deep, thought-provoking ideas about intelligence, language, consciousness, identity and more but the 1st person perspective and the pacing was so strange that the ideas never flew off the page like I wanted them to and I spent the entire read mildly frustrated.Also, vampires. And digital heaven. And really crazy world building, maybe I'm not smart enough to comprehend all the science-fiction and science in here. Weird one.

This book is an entry into the very small club of Science Fiction books that successfully portray a first contact scenario with a truly inhuman alien. The jargon is occasionally confusing, but the mysteries remain compelling up until their explanations unfold and the action kicks off. Around the edges of that story is an exploration of what it means to be human, and how that might change as both technology and medicine transform people’s bodies and minds. The human cast of this story has been transformed through various degrees of genetic alteration, cybernetic implants, surgically-produced multiple personalities, and even a partial lobotomy. Oh, and there’s even an honest-to-goodness vampire in this story, with a reasonably plausible scientific explanation behind him.

Extremely intelligent book that delves into first contact. One of the most visceral and compelling books I have ever read.

Most unsettling book I've read this year.

This is very good sci-fi.Really made me question the meaning of consciousness and sentience in a way that I'm still doing.Definitely a 'big ideas' book, not a plot and characters one, though they weren't distracting.atmospheric. creepy.

I've divided this review into two parts - first describes the literary qualities - story, language, atmosphere, etc. The second one is about the ideas that are to a degree related to the story but also very strong on its own. Feel free to weight each of those parts differently and therefore arrive at your own rating.

The literary qualities
Nothing really interesting is going on in this department, its average at best. Maybe even bellow the average. The problem is not in the story - its really good, thought-out, without any clunky parts, but nearly everything else is.. alien to the standard experience, which does not necessarily means wrong but it makes it really hard to delve into the story and into the reading flow. In points:
- first 1/3, maybe even more, is confusing, rather boring and not making much sense
- there is something wrong with the form the book is written it, its not really a book that you can get immersed in, that puts you in the flow and allows you to get completely overwhelmed with it. It feels more like a literature of fact, like a transcript of a court session or something like that.
- I've found the technical jargon of the spaceship quite overwhelming, but i suppose that is because English is not my first language.
To sum it up I've been missing all the enjoyment of a good book in this one, from the literary side. It simply felt as if the language, story, characters were just a vehicle to convey all the points, all the information author wanted to.

The data
Function over form, that's what this book evokes in me. Peter Watts has some very interesting views on the human nature, consciousness, evolution, sociobiology etc., all more-or-less based in scientific research and they absolutely dominate every other aspect of the book. Both story and characters are simply proprieties to demonstrate these views and to present all the information in a way that is more comprehensible to us humans. Our brains were designed in such a way that it is much easier to comprehend information in a form of a story - we are primed for stories in every possible way. Our lives are stories we create for ourselves, our goals and desires are to a large degree created by the stories that circulate in the society and so on. Its much more cognitively taxing to think in the abstract terms. And it works, when the intended information and concepts begin to appear in the story everything gets more much interesting and the last ~100 pages are a brutal storm of incredible ideas well worth it. I was already interested in the topics that Watts covers here but he managed to make everything much more concrete, more pronounced and he stirred my interest, so I am more likely to pursue those information.

I picked Blindsight up thinking I'd be reading an immersive sci-fi story. At least I got the immersive part right. I guess it is, technically, also a sci-fi story in so much that the plot takes place in space, but labelling this book as sci-fi would be doing it a disservice.This really is a heavy book, and keeping up with it is tough. Normally I put this down to lazy/pretentious writing and/or bad storytelling, but in this case it turns out to be more of a mutual agreement between the book and the reader. Yes, you have to struggle to get your head around it, but once your head is around it you realise that the struggle really was the only way to get where the book needed you to be. There is no black or white in this book, no simple characters, no easy answers. The characters are a collection of beings who are all very different, not only from each other, but also from what they once were, and what others may think they should be. The reader only ever sees these characters through the eyes of the narrator, Siri, who should in theory be the most reliable storyteller available. But is he?So many things are explored in this book, and there are trains of thought that are ethically, emotionally and (for me at least) intellectually challenging. Several times I had to re-read segments, not because I had missed something, but because I just hadn't understood the point or the impact of what I just read. And when I did finally understand, that didn't always make me less confused or unsure of what was going on. This is a book that will keep you guessing and keep you thinking, not only about what is happening in the book, but also about things that go beyond the book itself.In the end I have no idea whether I'd call Blindsight an inaccessible sci-fi story, or a somewhat accessible work of philosophy. I'm also not sure whether I liked it, or whether I loved it. The sci-fi in this book is solid, but is overshadowed by the great number of thought-inspiring avenues this book ventures into. I can't help but think I might have liked to go a bit further down some of these avenues, not to see them be resolved, but just to explore them a bit more. On the other hand, it's possible that the book very consciously stopped just short of where I would have liked it to go, and instead of "simply" being able to think about things, I also have to continue guessing as to what exactly the author wanted to make me think about.It feels wrong to say that I enjoyed this book, but I'm very happy to have read it. The feeling Blindsight gave me is comparable to that of working on a very complex problem: solving it can be frustrating, but once it's solved I feel great. Having finished this book I feel like I've almost worked through most of the problem, but without the satisfaction of having resolved it.Which, considering the book itself, seems about right.

“I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain.” In “Blindsight” by Peter Watts What if: There is only one consciousness that we all share? (Universal Consciousness) What if: People are caught in the illusion of separation? (Encouraged by the limitations of the five senses) What if: Fear and insecurity give rise to the need to think of ourselves as the creators of our consciousness? (Perhaps we tune into consciousness like a radio tunes into a station). "Consciousness" is body-mind. It is implied in the very meaning of the word "consciousness", the "con-" or "com-" signifying "together" or "altogether". What this "together" refers to is the senses and sense impressions. Body-mind is sensate consciousness, and is called therefore "mortal self in time" or "ego-nature". It is particularistic and therefore associated with "point-of-view" or perspectivising consciousness, like a searchlight or the beam of a flashlight stuck in one direction. This, and its self-understanding, is reflected in the famous symbol of the Enlightenment of a pyramid surmounted by the all-seeing eye such as symbolised still on the Great Seal of the United States, but is called by Blake "Single Vision & Newtons sleep" or "Urizen" or Urizenic Man. This is the "point-of-view" consciousness structure and is typically what we call "consciousness" or "mind". It is the perspectivising eye of da Vinci, but it is sensate. To be stuck in sensate consciousness is the human condition of narcissism. There is yet the awareness "before", "behind", "beyond", or "beneath", or implicit or tacit or however you want to describe it. The body consciousness, or mind, is only a function of the greater awareness. It is not sensate and is not dependent upon the body organisation for its function. By contrast with "point-of-view", it is "overview". In contrast to particularism, it is holistic, and perceives wholes rather than parts, and is often characterised as "oceanic feeling" or "oceanic awareness" and with non-locality. It is the “itself” that is referenced in the Zen Koan "show me your face before you were born". It is called by the neurologist Iain McGilchrist, "the Master", while the body-mind or body-consciousness, which is point-of-view and ego-nature, is called "Emissary". In those terms, the so-called "measurement problem" in physics is associated with the consciousness, which is body-mind, while the issue of "non-locality" (or synchronous effect or transluminal effect) is associated with the Awareness. In traditional Hermetic philosophy (alchemy), the body-mind was called "lead", and the awareness was called "gold". And the idea was to transmute the former into the latter through certain exercises, performances, or operations of a symbolic or metaphorical nature. Most scientists explicitly abandoned Cartesian Dualism centuries ago. But as John Searle pointed out 25 years ago, most of them still implicitly accept a Cartesian distinction and are hung up on trying reconcile two things are not two. So materialists tend to separate the world into two kinds of phenomena and assign one of them to reality and the other to illusion. When we eliminate the ontological difference that is implied in this account, things become a lot clearer. Similarly for forms of idealism. Consciousness is subjective in exactly the same way that digestion is. The nutrients in the food we eat are only available to us because the processes that extract them are internal to our bodies. Similarly the brain is internal to us and thus its processes are only directly accessible to us. The confusion about consciousness arises from two sources. The crypto-Cartesianism that still prevails and see mental and physical phenomena as ontologically different when in fact they are only epistemologically different. The problem of materialism is that it ignores the reality of structure. Clearly, the universe is made of one kind of stuff, but that stuff is made into a load of different things with many layers of complexity, with each layer displaying emergent properties. The only way to deal with this is to accept structure anti-reductionism alongside substance reductionism. In other words, structure is real. The second source is the insistence on dealing with conscious states in the abstract form "consciousness". Of course we are still arguing about the features of this abstraction. We have the same problem with all abstractions. Digestion becomes incomprehensible if we treat it as an abstraction as well. Conscious states are defined by David Chalmers as easy problems. His Hard Problem simply doesn't exist because it’s based on an abstraction mistaken for an entity. There is no "consciousness" there is only a sequence of conscious states. And these are wholly generated by the brain - whose substance can be reduced, but whose structure cannot. Searle also showed how we can have epistemically objective knowledge of ontologically subjective domains. The value of money is entirely subjective, for example, but objectively to anyone versed in European money, a 5€ counts as money of a certain value. This is an epistemically objective fact that has no basis in reality, only in the collective intentionality of people who use European money. Conscious states are ontologically subjective, but this does not preclude us from having epistemically objective knowledge about them. These are problems for which there have been solutions available for a generation. The solutions are by no means simple, I'm just referencing the main ideas here, and the resulting philosophy although largely settled is far more open to possibility, changed, and the unexpected that any form of scientific materialism. The trouble is that philosophers are more interested in arguments than in solutions. If they solve problems then they are out of a job, so they continue to generate arguments. Douglas Adams summed this up very nicely when he lampooned them in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The conceptual impasse of Watts really only arises because he refuses to abandon Descartes. That's the first step to a better worldview. “Blindsight” was, for me, equal parts brilliance and frustration. Watts obviously spent a huge amount of time with his investigation, and brings these details together relatively seamlessly SF-wise (which is no mean feat with so much crap being published in the SF area nowadays), but the overarching theme (consciousness is, evolutionarily speaking, epiphenomenal) left me puzzled. The tone of Watts' novel is resonant with a certain philosophical emptiness and the accuracy of his scientific extrapolation is stunning; unfortunately, the central hypotheses of the book strained my credulity. In this sense, my beef may be more with the premise than the book itself, which is no fault of Watts. A requisite for consciousness is a matrix, or form, or pattern, upon which consciousness can build. Curiously that necessary maquette seems quite arbitrary, and is usually wrong. It is a genetically inherited assumption about the nature of reality. But once encumbered with that genetically-installed assumption, there is no pathway to an intellectual breakthrough. To recap, an individual’s consciousness is simply one of the many Brain Operating Systems, based upon genetically-installed assumptions about the nature of reality. And is usually, and always wrong. The free book on the internet explaining it all runs to nearly a million words. It is tough going for those not familiar with the problems, and involves learning new concepts. The problem of consciousness is mostly down to a semantic error in the use of the word 'conscious'. If someone is hit over the head and is knocked out they may on recovering announce that they are now 'conscious'. It is clear that that's an empirical statement with a clear biological meaning. Descartes introduced an error in separating mind from body and gave rise to use of the word 'conscious' in a completely different (and I would argue meaningless) sense. So we have discussions about whether advances in AI will produce consciousness - utter nonsense of course, you might as well be arguing about whether a robot can have a pulse. The word conscious in this sense doesn't have a meaning. Bottom-line: “Blindsight” is a work of Hard SF of the highest caliber worthy of the capital H (even with its flaws). Those who lament the lack of hard sf being published (especially deep, broad, quality, hard SF) in the last few years will find sweet relief here. SF = Speculative Fiction.

Peter Watts is one of the more brilliant living science fiction authors, and "Blindsight" is an excellent addition to his work. This book has one of the more interesting takes on first contact with alien life I have read in a while, as well as quite a few interesting things to say on the topic on sentience.

Each generation has to re-tackle the major themes of science fiction anew, because the human world that aliens contact is changing all the time. You have but to look at, say, David Brin's 'Forge of God' to see that it was a situation where aliens were contacting the Earth of the mid- to late 1980s. Even when the first contact is set in the future, our view of that future hinges on how we view that future based on the concerns and emergent technologies of our own day. Arthur C. Clarke's '2001' was set in a very 1960s vision of a Big Science power block future. And the same applies to 'Blindsight'.But there is so much more to 'Blindsight' than just first contact with aliens. The world Peter Watts has built (his afterword to the novel seems to hint that there are some connections with the world of an earlier trilogy of his, 'Rifters') is way in advance of ours in terms of genetic manipulation, personality restructuring, space colonisation and virtual worlds. Oh, and Watts has found a use for matter transmission that is restricted to sending single sub-atomic particles from a to b.Having said that, Watts' Earth is only really sketched through the eyes of his characters; and we see comparatively little of it, mainly in passing. That's not really the point. And the aliens remain a puzzle, right up to the end where their belligerence is laid bare for all to see. And that is how it should be. Alien life is going to turn out to be more unknowable than we can imagine; Peter Watts gives us some pointers towards that.But 'Blindsight' isn't even really a novel about aliens. Rather, he takes a group of characters from our world on a journey to find aliens who were responsible for manifesting an encounter with the unknown on Earth, the sudden appearance of 62,000 alien probes that burn up in Earth's atmosphere and in that short time very possibly found out much more about us than we did about them. The crew that is sent to try to find the beings responsible for that act is comprised of a number of individuals, all of whom are in some way or another damaged; the bulk of the novel is taken up with exploring those personalities and finding (for the most part) the humanity limping along inside the, even though many readers might reject those personalities as barely human. There are a couple of exceptions - the extinct evolutionary line of human vampires, which disappeared way back in our prehistory, have been genetically re-engineered back for their predator's skills in organisation and strategy. 'Human' hardly describes them (most of the time).In the end, this is hardly a novel of first contact; rather, it's about us, about humanity at its weakest, when we are so damaged as to hardly seem human for one reason or another; and how, despite that, we are still human despite everything. Along the way, we have to get to grips with some serious science (as someone once said of another novel from another hand, "this isn't just Hard Science Fiction, it's bl**dy DIFFICULT science fiction!"). And then, just when you've resigned yourself to a long critique of the human condition, the action roars back with a vengeance - I had to read the last fifty pages or so in a couple of fairly breathless sittings because the story pulled me along. And all the science stuff fell into place, because it is important.Anyone who thinks science fiction is merely escapist adventure needs to read this book.

I'm not a big hard sci-fi fan. I usually avoid it. Much of the jargon is over my head and the characters are usually kind of in the background and not very deep. I picked this up on audio thinking that the blurb sounded interesting - vampires and sci-fi sounded like it was either going to be great or crash horribly. So I was pleasantly surprised by some of the deep characterization in this one and also that I liked the vampire. It really is amazing how intelligent some of these writers are. There were a number of different categories that Mr. Watts seems to be highly knowledgeable in and at least half the time I understood him with my lowly bachelors in computer information systems. That's not a bad ratio compared to some of the other hard sci-fi I've read in the past.I do have to say I was left lost on a couple of things and even did some googling to get more closure. My wife, who read this book at the same time (on audio also) is now listening to the 2nd book so I'm hoping she'll have some answers for me.

Forget 2001 and its progeny, this is *the* novel about alien contact. Both the aliens *and* the humans depicted in it seem both totally realistic but are 'alien' in different ways. It is not an easy read, but it is a rewarding one...

I really liked this book. Some of the ideas in it still have me thinking.

Rather hard scifi (considering it's a novel about first contact featuring vampires in space, um) that - as good scifi should - asks difficult questions about humanity, consciousness and emotion.I found this interesting and thought-provoking rather than enjoyable, but am struggling to write a review that doesn't turn into one of several essays. Good brain food; don't expect much in the way of sustenance for the heart.

This messed with my mind. The plot's okay, the characters are okay, but the main selling point here is the weirdness, and this book has plenty. It will make you think, and then it will make you think about thinking.

This book suffered in my estimation because I read it in close proximity to Solaris, a book that is a vastly superior depiction of contact between humanity and an alien. That being said, Blindsight is a solid work of science fiction, and if I hadn't followed it up with what is perhaps the best depiction of otherness the genre has ever produced, I would have been impressed with how different and alien the aliens of Blindsight are. It only suffers slightly from too many ideas thrown in to one book syndrome, and only a few of the ways humans responded to the alien presence made no sense. In this genre, that puts you solidly above average.

In response to planet earth being photographed by aliens humanity responds by sending a warship. Why a warship? Who knows. Likewise it makes little sense why the people sent on this mission take the most aggressive course of action repeatedly against what they think is a technically superior species. I just chalk it up to that being what humans do in books like this.

In the crew that humanity sends no one is fully human. One has intentionally generated multiple personality disorder, one is a cyborg (am I remembering that right? It's been a few months), one has been augmented to control robots like they are part of her own body, and one is a hyper intelligent vampire. The narrator has the ability to analyze things objectively without feeling emotion due to childhood brain surgery. So like I said, there are a whole lot of ideas bouncing around here at the same time. It would have been nice to have at least one fully human character in the narrative to see how your average human would respond to the situations that occur, but Blindsight seemingly eschews the idea of science fiction as a way to explore the human condition in favor of cramming in lots of ideas about transhumanism.

There are some cool ideas here, like the one about how all the signals humanity sends out into the universe could be interpreted as an attack by aliens that think and behave differently from ourselves, but this book didn't feel like a complete work. Things happen, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes just because, and then it ends. Like I said, it's solid. Read Solaris, then read a bunch more Lem, then wait a couple of months, then if you still want more stories of alien contact then maybe give Blindsight a try.

Wow! This is going to be a different kind of review for me. I can honestly say I'm not sure I understand what happened in this book, but I kept reading because I felt some underlying "thing" driving me to the end.

First, the problems:

I never felt grounded in Watts' world. Terms to describe the society were never explained. I guess he thought I was smarter than I am? This was almost as annoying as when authors explain everything as if I were stupid. Here is another example where there is a fine line marking how we gauge the intelligence of our readers. (I do read hard sci fi and enjoy it. The trick is giving me just enough info to follow the science--I don't feel like I got it here).
I could never picture any of the characters. Not physically anyway.
The main character and narrator had half of his brain removed as a child and it happened to be the side that processed emotions. Thus I never connected emotionally with the MC. Or anyone else for that matter.

So why did I keep reading to the end?

The plot was compelling enough that I just had to know what the heck was going on and I hoped there would eventually be some kind of explanation I could understand. Here, let's try this.

What I think might have happened in the book (possible spoilers, but I'm not sure):
Siri (MC) had seizures as a child, so his parents had half of his brain cut out and replaced with inlays to fix it. Society (this is on earth) had developed to a point where most people were full of wiring and electrical gadgets built in that the was normal.

To be useful, you specialized in specific inlays or upgrades. If you didn't want to be useful you just plugged your brain into Heaven to create your own realities while your body rotted in a vault. (I wish more of THIS had been discussed.)

Anyway, Siri was the synthesizer--meaning he gathered info through observation of "topography" or body language, compiled it and sent it back to whoever hired him. He doesn't even have to speak the language of those involved he is so good at this.

So, there is a threat and he's sent out into space with a small crew to do something. None of them really know what. They wake up from cryosleep and spend most of the book observing this thing. The ongoing question boils down to sentience versus intelligence. What is the norm of the universe?

People and aliens die. The vampire broods, spazzes out, is possessed by the ship (if he was ever his own person to begin with is debatable). Everyone is played. Heaven is unplugged by radicals. In the end, Siri goes crazy or becomes human again. The end.

Oh, and the title? Blindsight has something to do with your brain stem. Its the part of you that sees what the rest of your brain doesn't believe is possible. That shadowy movement you catch in the corner of your vision that disappears when you focus on it kind of thing.

Somehow, this book wasn't quite as good as it should have been, and I'm not sure what was missing. The writing is excellent. The book vacillates between being hilariously funny and incredibly disturbing. It is one of the creepiest books I have ever read (a lot of it reminded me of the "Silence in the Library" Doctor Who episodes), so it is good that there is a lot of humor to ease the tension. It is also very suspenseful.The characters are all quirky, but interesting, and vividly portrayed.The book explores what it means to be an individual. The (unreliable) narrator has only half a brain, and the rest of his brain is manmade. People can go to "Heaven" - a place where their consciousness is decorporealized and they can exist independently of their bodies. Another character has multiple personalities - four minds in one body. Other characters are grafted to machines, so that their senses are mediated by machinery. The vampire commander of the mission can plug his brain directly into the ship's computer. And the aliens are even weirder. The book can be difficult, because there are a lot of scenes where the reader doesn't really understand what is going on. Conversations between characters can be especially hard, because they will frequently end the conversation just before the big revelation, and it is implied that the reader should be able to figure it out, and often I couldn't.I read this book out loud, and it should have spawned a lot of great conversations with the person I read it to. (It isn't a very good book for reading out loud - it's hard for the listener to follow what's happening.) Yet somehow, other than "what just happened?" this book didn't generate conversations. There are so many fascinating concepts in this book, particularly about consciousness/sentience and what it means to be human... yet somehow they are explored in a way that doesn't leave room for the readers to do any of their own exploring.

Each time I have tried to describe this book to someone I end up making it sound silly when it's actually amazing.

I can't fault his cleverness in setting up the plot, but the style of writing is not really for me. I am having a hard time figuring out who these characters are, and the dialogue and prose seem kind of strained, making it hard for me to read. I have noticed this in other stories by Watts as well. I've gotten a little over halfway through and I think it's time to give up on this.

I like it, but I think it needs a second reading. The only thing that disappointed me is that I was left with the feeling that nothing much actually happened in the book. It's quite slow moving but it is very philosophical and not boring. I liked all the characters. They are all very original, but I am always a bit put off if the people are too smart, too strong or do everything perfectly. Seems too inhuman somehow. The aliens were quite amazing really alien! All in all, quite impressive reading.

The first of two recent novels whose plot features a genetically re-engineered subspecies of human, the other being Richard K. Morgan's "Thirteen". Watts book, which appears to be half of a longer work, examines the notion that sentience, self-consciousness, is not necessary to the survival of intelligent life, through an alien encounter/first contact story featuring a crew of differently abled humans captained by a re-created vampire.

Okay, I gave this book TWO second chances because I had heard great things about it, but I eventually gave up.

It's certainly a gutsy choice to have a person with no empathy as your main character, but it's pretty hard to get readers to care about someone who has only a vaguely intellectual interest in other people. Especially if the story is told in the first person by this character.
So as a result, we know that one guy is a vampire, and another guy has some kind of prosthetic senses, and there's a military woman and another woman with a multiple personality. We don't really get to know much else about them, or at least not by page 183.

The other problem I had with this book was that it was hard to picture exactly where everyone was and what they were doing in whatever scene. Most of the action takes place in a spaceship, and you never get a clear idea of how it's set up, plus there are all these sort of virtual-reality things going on at the same time, and the vampire guy tends to hide out in his room and you don't really know where that is, and I think there are supposed to be some kind of tents that the people live in? On a spaceship? I don't know.

Anyway, it's not that a book has to be easy to read; I like books that are complicated, but I think it's the mark of a good writer that you shouldn't have to be wondering where the aft thruster maintenance room is instead of just being engrossed in the story.