Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning author Peter Watts stands at the forefront of hard science fiction with his acclaimed novel "Blindsight." Two months have passed since the stars fell... two months of silence as a world held its breath. Now, a half-abandoned space probe, drifting sporadically beyond Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal cutting through the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever is out there is not speaking to us. It may be communicating with a distant star or perhaps something closer, something on its way.

So, who do you send to make contact with an unknown and incomprehensible alien intellect that does not wish to be encountered? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, whose brain has been surgically divided into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically connected to machines that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the quiet hope that she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once referred to as a vampire, called back from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist – an informative topologist missing half of his mind – as the interface between here and there. One can only hope they can be entrusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the being they are meant to find.