Peter Watts

A doctorate in zoology and resource ecology, taken at the University of British Columbia in 1991, explains most of what is odd about these books. Watts held research and teaching posts and worked as a marine mammal biologist, and he began publishing fiction at roughly the moment he finished graduate school. He holds a Hugo Award for a novelette.

The specialism is hard science fiction, and he takes that label more literally than most writers who claim it. His subject is not gadgets but biology under pressure: what consciousness is for, whether it is even an advantage, what an intelligence without it would look like, and how an organism behaves once the environment stops negotiating. The Rifters books put people on a deep-sea vent precisely because they are damaged enough to tolerate it, and the argument is that the damage is the job qualification. Blindsight takes the same instinct to first contact and asks whether self-awareness is a design fault.

He is also a much funnier writer than his reputation allows, which the essay collection makes obvious within a page. The tone across the fiction is bleak, technically dense and heavily annotated, and the notes are not decoration: Watts cites the papers, and a real part of the pleasure is finding out that the least plausible idea in the book is the one with a citation attached to it.