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").
I really like hard SF and will never again read by this author.
> Standard internet Watts warning that the Rift novels have random sexual torture just in case you prefer to avoid that
in thread next to this one is not really surprising me
Also, not really sure is Blindsight actually hard SF. It seems to be soft one at most with a lot getting close to magic with SF styling.