StarFish - Peter Watts

I've begun a book that I have set aside to read for three weeks. I would open any other book each night - looking at Starfish - by Peter Watts - Always cognizant of the pale blue visage on the cover of the book that I truly wished to read. Knowing just enough beyond the cover to know what lay before. I began two days ago. My hope was not misplaced.

What have we become, as a species? The gradual re-assembly of our DNA has begun. The internet - and its effect on our gene pool - is only now being felt. Children morph and grow under the influence of graphic sexual depiction as easily drawn from the ether as typing a search term. Best practices of kink are realized in forums that span the entire globe -with participants sharing their experience and wisdom for the sole purpose of translating their sexuality into line with their own conceived standard. List indexed algorithms become part of our mating rituals. What are your stats? The experiments in public expression and electronic communication- become the new expression of our genetic identity. All the while our genome is sequenced and trading between biologists working on the same network.

A medium that corporations are now attempted to control, tether and destroy. Have you noticed that you became powerful - as a person? When you started using the internet. In our world, there is no massive corporation known as the "Grid Authority" .. but how long before it arrives?

Starfish begins almost like a symphony - each note sounding from each instrument in concert. One at a time. Then they go away. Building in chords next, each instrument still isolated. The idea is simple. Take a group of people. Genetically engineer them to withstand the dark , pressure - the biolumescent realm of the deep undersea world. And from the beginning - faintly at first - we realize that the world in which they are sent - is a bit stronger and more dangerous than we believed. And under the ocean, where horrific predators swim in search of the scarce, light starved prey that like stars light up in the dark water - we slowly discover that these men and women.

Are insane.

I wonder sometimes what it might be like to be bioengineered. To have different elements of myself. One such element are the eyes of a main character. The new eyes - that are used in the dark - are void of pupil - silver. No emotion can be read in them. She chooses to wear them at meetings.

I would. As well. There is a scene in which this person chooses not to return for a while. She shuts off her light. And the predators that have for thousands of years learned that biolumescence equals food source halt the constant attack (they are normally smashed to bits - as the food is not of high quality and the fish are shot through with deficiencies) and ignore her. And she sees the lights floating around her. Her eyes adjust. And only then after she turns out the lights. Can she really see.

She is gone for three hours. And she begins to feel more at home in the dark - a world in which she exists. And in which her existence has a place as something other than a thing.

Peter Watts has painted a world in which the line between people and things is blurred. For example, there is a genetically engineered person called a 'smart gel'. An entity that exists in the electronic grid that seems to pervade the entire world.

A colorless being without form. That you somehow seem to know. And that powers decisions - and - owing to the grid its existence. As perhaps we, members of the 21st century society - seem to attribute all of the major qualities of our existence by the benefit to the corporations that now control every institution of our government. And would gladly reduce us to mechanical things if it were to improve their profit margin.

Each day, trading messages between man and woman. Autistic to aspergers. Isolated to hermiting - dominant to submissive - lonely to alone. Humanity reduced to the ebb and flow in the darkness. Glittering points of lights in a cold ocean. A place where there is no light.

Colorless beings move out of the dark. And they have teeth.