Agent to the Stars (John Scalzi)

I like most of Scalzi's work, and when I heard about this "practice novel" I knew I needed to read it. It is obviously amateurish compared with his later work. There's no serious character development and not much in the way of logic here. Aliens who have learned of Earth from our broadcasts want to meet and be accepted by humans because they're really nice guys, but they are really ugly and they smell bad. So, naturally, they come to a Hollywood ad agency to figure out a plan to get us to accept them. Coincidences pile up, aliens behave like humans, and the ending, while inevitable from the start, strains credulity past the breaking point. Still, it's fun. I enjoyed looking back at this first novel from an established leader in the field.

Echopraxia (Peter Watts)

I admired Watts's earlier Blindsight for its intelligence, its mind-blowing ideas, and its frequent reference to ideas that are square in the center of my own professional areas of interest. Echopraxia is more of the same, and even more so. It takes place in the same universe as the earlier book, focusing on what's going on back home while Humanity's heroes are engaging in a deeply mysterious first Contact. The main character, a biologist of the old school who eschews most forms of direct brain augmentation, gets caught up in an increasingly challenging set of circumstances as he fights to save himself and humanity from vampires, scientific mystics, military zombies, and alien slime mold. It's not clear whether or not he is successful. I admire the brilliance of his thinking and world-building. I love that I know about little bits of psychological research he tosses out. I was impressed with how he gave one character a unique voice, a sense of rapid delivery and impatience, simply by leaving out commas. Still, I can't say that I loved either book, and I'm afraid that it's because I'm not smart enough to read Peter Watts. I had the constant feeling that I didn't quite know what's actually happening, and kept going in the belief that it would become clear eventually, but it never did. If you loved Blindsight and you're smart enough to follow down the rabbit hole, you will probably love this one as well.

The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu)

This is the sprawling, complex first volume of a trilogy about a most unusual first contact. Set in China (the author's home), starting during the Cultural Revolution and continuing until today or possibly the near future, it tracks several different people with complex relationships. A woman working at radio transmission/monitoring station dedicated to tracking and possibly attacking satellites in orbit discovers, almost by accident, a way to harness the energy of the sun to send out a brief transmission detected by aliens from Alpha Centauri. This is a binary star system, with another fainter star that is believed to be part of the system as well - hence the three-body problem of the title. Orbital mechanics can completely solve the movements of two bodies, but except for a few special cases there is no general solution for predicting the movements of three of them. This means that these aliens live in a very hostile and trying environment. Still, they manage to (a) receive the message (which somehow is more powerful than the whole sun, despite being broadcast spherically), (b) decode it almost instantly (because it uses a "self-decrypting" format, whatever that is), and (c) respond in colloquial Chinese (in the same self-decrypting format). And this isn't even the least believable part of the story. Part of the problem is that I started out thinking of this as science fiction - if I had it in my "magic realism" category, perhaps it would have fit better. I just kept bumping up against science things and going, "um, no." So it didn't work for me, and I won't be reading the rest of the trilogy.

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

This is a deeply complex, challenging book that touches on topics that are important to me professionally: the blindsight of the title, for one thing, and also saccadic blindness, Cotard syndrome, and the nature and value of consciousness itself. It wraps this up in a first-contact novel like none other. The story starts when millions of tiny sensors drop into our atmosphere all over the world and immediately burn up, presumably after sending information to some alien ship. Humanity throws together several waves of manned and unmanned probes to try to reach the aliens and learn about them, hoping to open a dialogue at best, to defend ourselves at words. The story follows a ship containing a linguist with four different identities, a marine with neural connections to armies of mechanized grunts, a biologist whose normal senses have been replaced with a whole array of sensors, and a synthesist whose job is to translate what experts learn into terms ordinary folks can understand, under the command of a vampire. Seriously. It all makes sense. The aliens are more completely alien than anything I've ever seen before, and they apparently think of us the same way. The story doesn't have a happy ending, not only because of what aliens may do to us, but because of what we are doing to ourselves. I read this long ago and remember thinking that I need to read it again so I can get more out of it the second time, because it is so dense. Now seemed like the right time, as I want to read his next book, set in the same universe: Echopraxia.