I went in as a Blindsight loyalist, which I think is a prerequisite here, this is very much a sequel in tone and universe even though the two barely share characters. Where Blindsight had Siri’s first-person narration doing a lot of the emotional legwork, Echopraxia pulls back to third person and swaps in Daniel Bruks, a burned-out biologist who I found less compelling than Siri from the opening pages, and that shift in narrative distance is the thing I see most readers of the pair land on too.

What Watts is actually doing here, wedging genuinely hard neuroscience and evolutionary biology in among vampires and zombies and a hive-mind monastic order, and asking whether consciousness might be a liability rather than an achievement, is as dense as anything in the genre, and I mean that as a real compliment and a real warning. There’s a stretch in the middle where I had to stop and look up terms just to keep pace with what the sentence was actually claiming, and I don’t consider myself a lightweight reader. That’s not a flaw exactly, it’s the book being exactly as uncompromising as its premise demands, but it does mean this isn’t a book you hand to someone as an entry point.

The ending arrives fast, almost too fast, one chapter that felt like it needed thirty more pages to land the way the setup earns, and I sat there afterward thinking is that it. Still, this and Blindsight together are as serious an exploration of what consciousness even is as anything science fiction has produced, bleak, brilliant, occasionally exhausting to actually get through. Four stars, and I needed real recovery time before starting anything else.