Plot
In the year 2082, everyone on Earth becomes aware of an alien presence when thousands of micro-satellites, dubbed "Fireflies", survey the Earth in a bright planet-wide flash. Through good luck, an incoming alien vessel is detected, and the ship Theseus, with its artificial intelligence called Captain and crew of five, are sent out to engage in first contact with the huge alien vessel called Rorschach.
As they explore the vessel in multiple excursions and attempt to analyze it and its inhabitants, the narrator, Siri, considers his life and strives to understand himself and ponders the nature of intelligence and consciousness, their utility, and what an alien mind might be like. Eventually the crew realizes that they are greatly outmatched by the vessel and its unconscious but extremely capable inhabitants.
When the level of this threat becomes clear, Theseus runs a kamikaze mission using its highly destructive antimatter payload, seemingly succeeding in eliminating the aliens. Siri returns to Earth, which he eventually realizes is being overrun by an offshoot of humanity.
Read more about this topic: Blindsight (science Fiction Novel)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)