For August’s book club meeting we’ll be discussing Blindsight by Peter Watts. Two months have past since a myriad of alien objects clenched about the Earth, screaming as they burned. The heavens have been silent since—until a derelict space probe hears whispers from a distant comet. Something talks out there: but not to us. Who should we send to meet the alien, when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

Send a linguist with multiple-personality disorder and a biologist so spliced with machinery that he can’t feel his own flesh. Send a pacifist warrior and a vampire recalled from the grave by the voodoo of paleogenetics. Send a man with half his mind gone since childhood. Send them to the edge of the solar system, praying you can trust such freaks and monsters with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find—but you’d give anything for that to be true, if you knew what was waiting for them. . . .

What we discussed at the last book club meeting: For July’s book club meeting we discussed Something More Than Night by Ian Tregillis. Boldly described as “a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas’s vision of Heaven. It’s a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.”

“Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making.”

We liked the concept of the story but at times found it was a little confusing. The explanations of the Mantle of Consistency and other angel related things went over our heads a few times. And at first we enjoyed Bayliss’s noir style of speech it grew rather tiring very quickly. Overall this was a decent book but not sure if we will recommending this with much enthusiasm.

When: Monday, August 11th, 2014 6:30pm-7:30pm
Where: Filter Cafe 1373-75 N. Milwaukee Ave

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