I finally finished Echopraxia by Peter Watts this June—a sequel (or rather companion) to my beloved Blindsight, long awaited and wildly anticipated. This is hardcore hard‑SF: dense with ideas, heavy with references, and often more rewarding to read the annotations than the book itself. And yet, that very richness is both its virtue and its vice.
Much like Blindsight, Echopraxia throws you into deep waters. Watts doesn’t shy from technical and philosophical terms—often more than one might reasonably digest in a single sentence. I often found myself grasping only the prepositions, let alone the scientific jargon. From a readability standpoint, that can be a serious barrier.
Dialogues, too, occasionally felt stage‑like—artificially dramatized, at times almost theatrical. The characters often spoke in ways that underscored an authorial artifice more than natural human interaction. It gave parts of the narrative a somewhat contrived feel.
Nevertheless, the book delivers a barrage of intellectual meat. In Blindsight, Watts explored the idea that intelligence doesn’t require consciousness—and he wove in the classic Chinese Room argument: imagine someone in a sealed room manipulating Chinese symbols purely according to rules, producing outputs indistinguishable from a fluent speaker—yet the person understands nothing of the language. Searle’s thought experiment highlights how syntax alone doesn’t equal semantics—how a system can appear intelligent without truly “grasping” meaning.
Echopraxia pivots to another concept: echopraxis—the involuntary mimicry of actions observed in others. The term originates from a psychiatric phenomenon where one unconsciously imitates movements—essentially, physical echoing of what’s seen. In Watts’s fictional universe, it becomes a metaphor for how easily our actions, decisions—even our beliefs—can be unconsciously shaped by our surroundings.
This resonated deeply with me. In an age of curated news feeds, algorithmic echo chambers, and constant social feedback, how free are our thoughts? Two people living under the same roof, reading from different media sources, can end up inhabiting entirely different worlds. Echopraxia makes the point that our autonomy is far more fragile—and more illusory—than we like to admit.
I started reading this in March, pushing slowly through its labyrinthine prose. It was a slog—a genuinely painful effort at times. But I don’t regret a page of it. I derived a certain weird enjoyment: the pleasure of intellectual challenge, of being dragged into ideas just when clarity seems to slip away.
Would I recommend it? Only to a specific crowd: fans of uncompromising, idea‑heavy hard‑SF—the kind who crave novelty and philosophical exploration more than literary polish or emotional resonance. If you came for a smooth, entertaining narrative—this might not be your cup of tea.