Peter Watts

Hotshot

Mundy Otto Reimer

As much as I adore Watts' other books Blindsight and Echopraxia, I gotta say that this story was just so-so. I ended up taking the advice of one of the previous reviewers, @TheCaptain and started this series of short stories in non-publication order (which is apparently chronological order story-wise), which makes this the first story in the bunch. 

The story is only 23 pages and introduces the background of the main protagonist going forward, but other than that I didn't get much out of it that seemed novel or salient enough for me to write a substantial analysis about. I think I may just need more context information regarding the rest of the stories in the series tbh. With that said, the whole free-will vs. superdeterminism thing seems to provide a nice fertile bed for the next couple of stories. If anything, the speculation around the idea that the evolution of a system and how the interactions between causal parts end up layering constraints upon constraints that "lock up" a system into perfect order and harmony is also something I discuss in my review and analysis of Frank Herbert's original Dune. Other than that, the writing style is really good and obviously so Peter Watts-esque, if you know what I mean 🤓 For those that don't, it's basically chock-full of science jargon written in a very in-your-face + casually-dropped manner, while simultaneously being beautifully poetic. 

Oh, maybe one thing I can mention is that this book totally reminded me of my crazy psychedelic experience with mushrooms! You can find my funny trip report here and its associated discussion on Reddit here if you're curious, haha. Imagine trying to attain nirvana and gain free-will through an acute overdose of exposure to our sun. That's this novel in a nutshell, lol. 

Anyway, with that said, I'm going to continue onwards and see if *The Freeze-Frame Revolution* puts this into better context and excites me🤞