His characters have personalities and depth, and if most of them aren’t very nice people, well, that’s appropriate to the dystopian hellholes they inhabit.
He can also vividly ground the reader in the viscerality of a character’s experience, the physical sensations and emotions, and make even vastly unlikable people sympathetic and compelling. Peter can write a paragraph about a spaceship course-correcting on a high-g burn that would make Herman Melville wring his hands in envy. But he’s also a poet-a damned fine writer on a sentence level, who can make you feel the blank Lovecraftian indifference of the sea floor or of interplanetary space with the same ease facility with which he can pen an absolutely breathtaking passage of description.
His work is rigorous, unsentimental, and full of the sort of brilliant little moments of synthesis that make a nerd’s brain light up like a pinball machine. Peter is crown royalty among writers of science fiction’s most difficult subgenre-that generally referred to as “hard” science fiction. With that classic opening line-spoken in the voice of Siri Keeton, first-person narrator-Peter Watts does not so much invite as abduct the reader into the experience of a Human being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, about to discover just how wrong the universe can really be.
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