Blindsight is his best book, but Watts has written a lot of great stuff, I recommend all of Rifters and, for something a bit different, especially the Sunflowers cycle.
You might want to read his blog [0] to get more insight into his character. I got the impression that the author is a great and likeable human being that became rather cynical due to his disillusionment with humanity.
Second this recommendation. Blindsight hits much harder and faster than Egan - and in my opinion the writing is much tighter. Similar focus on science-based idea exploration, particularly in regards to theories of consciousness, brain structure, probability, and vampires. If you like Egan I'd be shocked if you didn't like watts. He is one of the hidden gems of science fiction and an absolute gift to humanity.
Brilliant fan fiction that takes a few liberties, but it would be interesting to have The Thing's perspective if The Thing was made into a series. I think in the movies was just supposed to be cosmic horror who's only real goal was to survive by spreading. Communicating with it would be pointless, unlike in Watt's story, where you have a fundamental philosophical difference based on The Thing's understanding of biology, but you could at least have a meaningful conversation with it.
Maybe we read totally different books called "Blindsight" by Peter Watts because this sounds like a completely different experience than what I and most other readers have had.
The one with sort-of-vampires with epileptic effects triggered by corners, creatures capable of movement starting and completing in way their movement was not noticeable by human brain and curiously trusting people in way that ended in predictable bad ending?
Yeah the crucifix glitch is kind of silly though it does have an internally consistent explanation. I feel like maybe you didnt read the notes and references (complete with citations)? Because otherwise you would know this?
Was the ending actually bad? like badly written or bad for the characters? Personally I thought the ending was good. It felt inevitable and also positive. Humanity got to keep living and the main character reached some type of personal growth.
Anyway heres the section from the notes and references that you must not have read about the "creatures capable of movement - not noticeable by the human brain"
For example, the invisibility trick of that young, dumb scrambler— the one who restricted its movement to the gaps in Human vision— occured to me while reading about something called inattentional blindness. A Russian guy called Yarbus was the first to figure out the whole saccadal glitch in Human vision, back in the nineteen sixties15. Since then, a variety of researchers have made objects pop in and out of the visual field unnoticed, conducted conversations with hapless subjects who never realised that their conversational partner had changed halfway through the interview, and generally proven that the Human brain just fails to notice an awful lot of what's going on around it16, 17, 18. Check out the demos at the website of the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois19 and you'll see what I mean. This really is rather mind-blowing, people. There could be Scientologists walking among us right now and if they moved just right, we'd never even see them.
"bad ending" not as in "badly written" but as in "bad end" - bad things in general happen in fictional world and to this fictional characters (as opposed to "good ending" or "bittersweet ending").
Somebody will always say something like this on any thread anywhere on the internet about any sci-fi. I dont know whats so attractive about gatekeeping "hard scifi" but it must be satisfying since so many people feel compelled to do so.
Regardless Blindsight is a good book and definitely has interesting concepts and good writing throughout.
In all seriousness, I thought I had seen it in a list of "top hard sci-fi books" awhile back and a quick Kagi search seems to imply that a lot of people seem consider it hard sci-fi for whatever reason.
