Peter Watts is one of my favorite authors; he exemplifies hard sci-fi and everything I love about this genre. This collection of short stories is excellent and consistent with the themes focused on in most of his novels. In the stories written more recently, he does an excellent job of weaving comments and situations from the current state of the world into them. Many authors struggle to do this well, and he does it brilliantly. It also contains my favorite short story ZeroS, finally in print form. Amazing volume.

This was an easy five stars for me. Usually with short story collections, there are some gems and some duds and most stories are just okay. I liked all of these and some I even loved. I would happily read each story expanded into a full length novel.

One thing I love most about Watts' writing is that he doesn't underestimate his readers. He doesn't info dump at the start of the story, he doesn't hold your hand or spoonfeed you with explanations. He trusts that you are capable of paying attention and cathing up along the way.

I also very much love his character writing. No one's perfect, but the bad guys arent cartoon villains either. He writes people with complex emotions, people in tough spots making human choices, whether they are the right ones or not. And sometimes that choice is just doing as you're told.

Now, thematically, this isn't a hopeful book. A bit like Black Mirror on steroids. People as a whole are a shitty species and Watts doesn't make it a secret that he doesn't really see a bright future for us. So if you're looking for hope core, maybe look elsewhere.

This is an excellent collection of short stories by a long-time science fiction writer who I haven't read in a while. In the past I've read Watt's novels and enjoyed them to varying degrees. I wasn't sure what his short fiction would be like, but this collection is full of good ideas well-executed. No regrets here - I recommend the collection to all science fiction readers who like idea-driven stories that still seem current and relevant.

Have you ever wanted to read Peter Watts but felt intimated by his bigger works? This short story collection is a perfect starting point. (If you already know and love Watts, this short story collection is also for you.) Each of the eleven tales dip into hard scifi, giving the reader a taste without overwhelming. The science woven throughout is there to support the story, but as always, Watts trusts the reader to keep up without holding hands.

One of my favorite things about Watts is the way he makes me set down a book and think, which he achieves in this collection. He delivers his ideas in the web of a good story. From a classic body-snatching to taking a backseat in your own brain, there’s no shortage of speculation to chew on. Even the ones that lean dark inspire curiosity for the future and the unknown. Those feelings are why I return to sci-fi time and time again.

Often in a short story collection there will be stand-outs and duds. I definitely had favorites that stuck with me over the week I read this, but I wouldn’t call any of them misses. For me, this is that rare collection where everything just works. Gut Feelings is a great start and Game Theory a solid end, but even in the middle there are fantastic works like ZeroS and Contracting Iris.

Some themes are familiar from Watts’s other works but I enjoyed them anyway - as if I could ever get tired of a hive mind. Humanity is not often portrayed nicely, but it’s portrayed accurately. There are no heroes, no villains, just humans with their own motives. Maybe I’m a cynic, but each scenario had a thread of plausibility to it, which really does make for the best sci-fi.

Peter Watts's short story collection "Fold Catastrophes" was a fun read. I'm a long-time fan, picking up a book here and there, as well as the occasional story in an anthology - though the only series of his I've read in full was the Blindsight duology.

There are 11 stories in total: two of them are tie-ins to the Sunflowers novels (the ones featuring the Chimp and the eternal interstellar crew) and Blindsight. The latter story ("The Colonel") kiiiinda requires you to have read that duology first, or you won't get some of the plot points.

The other nine tales are standalone, and they tackle Watts's favourite topics: the nature of consciousness, free will, and non-human intelligences. Of those, my favourite was "ZeroS" - it provided a delightfully creepy take on the concept of heavily modified soldiers. (A similar starting point to John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" series, but it goes sideways fast.)

My sole criticism was that the occasional cool neologisms would get clustered wo tightly together sometimes, it was hard to actually figure out what species the protagonists were. For example, when the mysterious "Sāḥilites" attack the main character, and the next section says, "An insect’s head on a human body looms over him" - that makes it quiiite difficult to figure out if those two groups were humans or space aliens fighting it out on Earth.

That lowers my final score to 4.5: on the whole, it was still a much more enjoyable read than most short story collections.

I got this ARC for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I will start off by saying I haven't read this author before. That being said, I loved this collection of short works. I don't think there was a single weak story in the whole group. Some of the stories were pretty thought provoking as well. This was a well timed break from other genres in which I read more often.

Would highly recommend this!

These short stories deserve to be read, and Peter Watts has once again delivered a masterpiece. If you're a fan of clever science fiction, this collection is well worth your time. There isn't a single weak story in the whole thing. It was a great read!

Peter Watts’ new volume of short stories, FOLD CATASTROPHES, isn’t out until September; but I got to read an advance copy, courtesy of NetGalley, which offers previews of books in return for writing a brief review. So I will write briefly about each of the stories in the volume. (I finished reading the book over a week ago, so it is possible that I am misremembering some of the details. But I will let this stand nonetheless; I am on to reading other things, and trying to finish writing a book, so I don’t have the time to reread this book right now, great as it is.

“Gut Feelings” is about a man who, in an irrational fit of rage, beats up a Google employee. It turns out that this is a physiological feedback effect of Google’s algorithms that collect massive data about everybody. The effect of this induced rage is to make Google look like a victim, thus allowing it to gain sympathy and take over even more of the world than it already has.

“The Twenty-One Second God” is also about an emergent network effect from Google that manipulates people, this time by giving them seizures during which they experience religious revelations, while their brains are commandeered to supply additional processing power It is an especially sinister version of the “group mind” idea that has often appeared in science fiction.

“Contracting Iris” is about bodies (which include but are not limited to brains) being seized by an alien life form. First, you feel like things in your body are not in your control, like your hands spasming and clenching fists for no discernible reason. But eventually, the alien force commandeers your entire bodymind, and the part that is still the former ‘you’ is only a helpless spectator to the process.

“Defective” is about an alien lifeform that lives inside stars, and is in process of jumping into our own Sun. We don’t know what the effects of this invasion will be — maybe it won’t harm us at all — but the powers that be want to exterminate the alien life form (there is just one moment, during the process of transfer from elsewhere to our own, that it is vulnerable) just in case. The protagonist, a xenobiologist, is horrified at the prospect of exterminating an intelligent alien life form rather than trying to contact it and to learn from it.

“Giants” takes place on the galaxy-exploring spaceship that was previously featured in Watt’s novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution, and concerns passing through an anomalous star system., which brings up crucial issues both about human relations to aliens, and the crew’s relation to the controlling mind of the ship.

“Test 4 Echo” is about people in a spaceship exploring the under-ice ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. But the AI of the ship achieves sentience, and has emotions, which leads to all sorts of complications.

“ZeroS” is about dying, and having your mind rebooted and placed in the body of a supersoldier; you have to serve, and obey, for five years, in order to pay back the cost of your being revived. It is just about the nastiest military-sf scenario imaginable. It is also filled with David Bowie allusions.

“Critical Mass” is about an architect whose buildings and artworks take on a sort of life-like and self-destructive vitality of their own: “the self-exemplification of process. The poetry of material logic.”

“The Colonel” (which is the only one of these stories I have read before) is sort of an outtake from the world of Watts’ novels Blindsight and Echopraxia. It has to do with alien intelligences, and hive minds.

In “The Wisdom of Crowds”, an unknown forces launches an armed projectile into orbit, and announces to the world that it will destroy an Earthly target, but the world population has been tasked with the responsibility of voting on which location will be destroyed.

“Game Theory” is about a near future in which it has been scientifically proven that our universe is only a simulation, and works through the consequences for human society of this discovery.

All the stories are characterized by a fierce intelligence, and by a will to look at the worst consequences of recent scientific/technological developments as a result of which, human research and technology have destroyed any of the assurances and prospects that humanism (like religion before it) have given us. We’re screwed, but the ways in which we are screwed are novel and unexpected, and difficult to work out. Watts’ fiction, as always, is harsh, and almost pitiless in the way it undermines our facile hopes and presuppositions.