Blurbs: ßehemoth

Pro

Con

ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] … Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution … For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

A taut thriller fueled by cutting-edge scientific speculation, whose fast-moving plot doesn't neglect the subtleties of character. Watts presents a world that is recognizably our own, yet as alien as a distant planet: the microbe-ravaged mainland ... and an intensely atmospheric evocation of the claustrophobic ocean depths... It's a profoundly dystopian vision, plumbing the blackest depths of the human psyche and the ultimate extremities of environmental disaster ... [an] acute examination of the meaning of moral responsibility, when conscience is a product of altered brain chemistry. This is the most memorable SF I've read so far this year — absorbing, thought-provoking, and above all intelligent. It's a terrific conclusion to a notable series.

As a great admirer of Watts's uncompromising fictional vision, I'm happy to report that the wait for the conclusion of the trilogy was well worth it. ... [A preceding] bare-bones synopsis cannot convey the complex moral calculus that Watts embodies in his ambitious tale of conscience deferred. Everyone involved in the harrowing denouement is both wounded and culpable. And, very much to the point, even readers may feel complicit when they find themselves sympathizing with characters who have been responsible for as many as a billion deaths.

Intense, beautifully written conclusion to [Watts'] Rifters trilogy ... Like some adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke's The Deep Range and Gibson's Neuromancer, Watt's trilogy represents a major addition to early 21st-century hard SF.

The writing is compelling, jittery, full of dark irony.  One of the novel's most fascinating aspects is its extremely inhospitable setting ... Readers will also find themselves gripped by the flawed and ferocious characters shaped by a social situation bleaker than anything outside John Shirley's early novels.  They're uncomfortably believable ...

Watts's thorough research renders the details vivid and telling, and he shows significant signs of developing into a true stylist.

The basis for what plot there is comes down to sexual torture, whose scenes, presented unsparingly, many readers will find utterly repellent. ... Watts has to decide whether to write SF or horrific porn.

Watts has set up another highly provocative thriller plot ... He's got a profoundly black sense of humour about the apocalypse he has constructed ... and writes with passion and wit. His characterization is subtle and sharp: while the central figures are deeply disturbed, riven by black anger, loss, guilt or the lack of it, they challenge preconceptions and gain a reader's trust, even concern.

It's too bad Watts's publisher felt it had to split his final volume in two, as [ß-Max] ends on a cliff-hanger...

Much violence follows, as it must in the world Watts has constructed for his dark future ... Watts is not only a top hard-SF writer, whose scientific speculations are cutting edge, he can create truly interesting, if also truly disturbing, characters. Few writers can mix the felt realities of contemporary science with such a truly frightening view of where it might take us.

Watts tells his story with hard-hitting prose and fast-paced action scenes that should appeal to fans of hard sf and sf thrillers.

Memorable characters and action-packed scenes of high drama and taut suspense make this a good choice for sf collections.

Fast-paced and dramatic, promising revelations in a satisfactory (one hopes) conclusion.

A cliff-hanger of the worst sort, leaving almost every end loose ... another volume will conclude the story...

There is hope for the world, after all. ßehemoth: Seppuku lives up to the promise of ßehemoth: ß-Max.

A deathly-dark near future ... [a] gorgeously grim series.

Dark and scary... the series comes at last to a notion-rich resolution. "Behemoth: Seppuku" ... wraps up a lot of complicated and inventive material pretty neatly.

At half a year between sections ... it's difficult to keep every plot thread straight. ... [Seppuku] would be a difficult stand-alone novel.

Peter Watts continues to do a number of things brilliantly... [he] succeeds beautifully in conveying his milieu.  This is a very visual book ... some genius of the screen would have a heyday with such scenes as Lenie battling hypertrophied sea monsters or cracking open her chest to reprogram her somatic parameters. The claustrophobia, the constricted life-support modules and the eerie, deadly, mysterious beauty of the seabed are conveyed in finely tuned, poetic prose.  [Lenie Clarke's] painful mental adjustments are palpable.  Subsidiary characters ... come across vividly.  And Watts remains a master of tight, intricate action scenes, staging battles and rescues and explorations like a choreographer.

There's no sense of new frontiers being opened up, just one of old threads exfoliating. Although Atlantis is beautifully evoked, it's still basically a single stage set...[and] the Machiavellian doings by both the rifters and the corpses are just too ultra-convoluted and drawn out.

Watts's writing is just as intricate and involving as ever...Taken together, the three books represent a sustained assault on the status quo, within science fiction and without, that's hard to read without being affected. It's all very uncomfortable, but it puts the Rifters Trilogy squarely in a noble tradition within science fiction. Authors such as Orwell, Brunner, and Watts have all told us: Avoid this future at all costs, you bloody fools! It's a message worth repeating until it's heeded.

Peter Watts is one of the foremost contemporary science fiction writers, a skilled craftsman with a visionary imagination firmly rooted in hard science. ... Behemoth is far superior to the bulk of contemporary science fiction writing, deftly balancing elements of thriller and military writing with post-apocalyptic visions and a fully realized world terrifyingly near our own. The trilogy is a must-read for even a passing science fiction fan.

While it’s hard to pass judgement on what is really only half of a novel ... There is an air of perfunctoriness to the storytelling, with a superficiality of characterization and rushed pace at odds with the slowly mounting paranoia of Starfish and the carefully modulated developments of Maelstrom.

Watts has this Apocalypse thing down, readers. He's got the chaos and the details, the horror and the wonder, the science and the fiction, all the components of the end of the world, not as we know it, but as we feel it. Maybe that's not a feeling you want to experience twenty-four-seven. But the old two-four-seven sure won't seem the same after you read this book, that's for effing sure.

Although Watts is a skillful storyteller...

...you might want to wait until you have both halves in hand because the sense of incompleteness left me feeling unusually unsatisfied.

Will civilization crumble? Will Achilles Desjardins, with his own dark twists, hold things together? Will Lenie Clarke save her world, and perhaps the larger one as well? I think it safe to say that readers will be satisfied.

Peter Watts sure knows how to write...the real drama is interior: both the corpses and their wardens, black-clad psychopaths implanted with enough machinery to let them live a thousand metres underwater, are interested in guilt, and just what humanity is capable of without it. ßehemoth: ß-Max is a moody meditation enlivened with sporadic violence...

...but it lacks the obsessive tech talk and doomsday drama of its predecessors. ... There's a reason porn films never stop to ask the principals How did it feel for you? Do we really want to know?

That [ßehemoth: Seppuku] mostly overcomes the handicap of its sundering is a testament to the storytelling ability and imagination of Peter Watts. [He] blows things up with panache … Readers who have stuck with Clarke through three books will find much to enjoy. Lubin really comes into his own here.

While by no means shallow, it lacks the depth and sense of outrageous surprise that characterized its predecessors...The psychological intensity and acuity of earlier volumes slackens accordingly, with the notable exception of Lubin ... Some readers will be disturbed by the clinical attention paid to Desjardins' exploits as a sexual predator; Watts probably crosses [the line]. Some of these flaws would have been less visible had the book been published as the author intended; Seppuku [is] really just the climax of something much longer, as though the last 20 pages of a novel were published separately as a short story.

Though I did not read the prior books, I was able to catch up, was quickly engrossed in the action, and am anxious to read everything this author has written...Peter Watts writes excellent underwater SF. I highly recommend ßehemoth Book One (and can't wait for Book Two).

Don't miss this series. I enjoyed both volumes of ßehemoth very much and look forward to whatever Peter Watts chooses to write next.

Watts's primary talent is his skill at projecting paranoia and unease. His characters infect the reader with psyches as twisted as much as their bodies have been modified. There’s nothing pleasant or rollicking about this book, but—as with Watts’ earlier works—that cold darkness somehow manages to evolve into something fascinating.

The future that Watts has crafted is deep and well-fleshed... The digital monsters that prowl what was once the Internet are a delightful touch, adding a face of sub-sentient malice to the enemies that besiege the surviving North American enclaves... There's also a great appendix in which the author discusses which of his Sfnal conceits are already real, which are entirely made up and which have become more feasible since he finished the novel. It's fascinating stuff and made all the more readable because Watts has a caustic and highly cynical wit.

'Behemoth: B-Max' and 'Behemoth: Seppuku' are enthralling reads and although the decision to publish the two volumes separately is a regrettable one, they both come highly recommended. This is contemporary SF at its best.

Well-written, high-powered science fiction, with fascinating, if not always appealling characters, and a wide range of interesting technological extrapolations. ... the underwater scenes are particularly well done. This is the real stuff.