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Comment by ragazzina | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the people that didn't understand Blindsight are probably better off reading Dungeon Crawler Carl.

What kind of criticism is "no need to have Dracula in space"? The novel is about other types of intelligence, and the question is whether a conscience is necessary for intelligence, a topic that in similar words is discussed every day on this same forum many times a day.

In the book there are normal humans, upgraded humans with severed emotions, there are absolute sociopaths that are still conscious, and there are intelligent aliens with no conscience at all. Were they supposed to be all different alien species? I prefer it this way, there's more variety.

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> What kind of criticism is "no need to have Dracula in space"?

It's more of a literary criticism, I think.

I get the vampire is meant to be part of the diversity of human nature in the crew.

The problem for a lot of readers is it's distracting while not adding anything substantial.

It's more like Watts got some glee out of updating vampire mythology in the future, rather than deeply serving the plot. The vampire could have easily been replaced with a genetically-engineered super-smart psychopath, and nothing important would have changed.

> The problem for a lot of readers is it's distracting while not adding anything substantial.

I think it totally does. Book is about various modalities of intelligence: regular humans, space intelligence, main character (who is obviously different from regular humans), and vampires look fine in this diversity.

The aspects of the vampire that are interesting for the story could be better placed in a non-vampire character (why I suggested a genetically-engineered person like Khan), while still maintaining diversity.

Whereas "vampires" immediately call to mind Vlad, Dracula, Twilight, etc. and an entire literary tradition of the last century, which Blindsight has little to do with. There's the riffing on crucifixes with the right-angle seizures, but that's more cutesy than serious.

It's not the worst decision on Watts' part, but I think you're in the minority in liking it.

> why I suggested a genetically-engineered person like Khan > Whereas "vampires" immediately call to mind Vlad, Dracula, Twilight,

as far as I remember, vampires in Blindsight were recovered from some fragments of ancient DNA, and heavily re-engineered, so it matches your type of narrative, and not Dracula type vampires.

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