If you like this, you should really pick up Peter Watts' books. He is the author of the post, the owner of rifters.com and one of the best hard SF authors out there. I can't recommend him enough.
Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0].
My personal favorite is Blindsight [0][1]. I read it multiple times (3 or 4, I think) over the years.
If you like Blindsight, you’ll probably want to continue with the sidequel, Echopraxia. You can also find them bundled together under the name Firefall.
And I think out of his main works, Blindsight is probably the most accessible. It also led me to Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self” [2], which Watts used as a source material in his research and had good things to say about.
The Rifters series is great, too, but there’s a sort of darkness or heaviness to it that may not work for everyone.
And bonus content, a fan made short movie based on Blindsight, here: [3].
Can't recommend Watts enough - Blindsight is one of my top 3 favorite novels. He periodically drops hints about his progress on the sequel to Echopraxia.
For quick recommendations, I'd single out two of his short stories (which are two of my favorite stories in general):
Blindsight really fucked with my head, and not in a good way.
Books can do that. Like, read Tom Robbins and you'll fall in love with the next person you see. Read Peter Watts and you'll spend the next four years looking at the person next to you like they're an alien who's plotting to lay eggs in you without themselves even knowing it.
Can confirm, I think about Blindsight a lot (I think it's good), and when I was 21 I fell for a girl after we found out we were both reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Robbins)
My experience with Echopraxia is that it's significantly more confusing and complex then Blindsight. There are chunks of Blindsight that go over my head, but in general you can get the gist of it from context (and was rewarded on rereads as things progressively became clearer). Echopraxia somehow was not able to navigate the tension between ambiguity and outright confusion. I believe Peter Watts has acknowledged this as a problem in Echopraxia and spent a Reddit AMA explaining to readers what the plot was.
I do need to reread Echopraxia though, and perhaps my opinion will change after that. Blindsight was brilliant enough that it deserves the extra effort to appreciate.
Ensure communities of people have spent years trying to find books similar to Blindsight/Firefall in general to scratch the itch (with 0 success), so, be careful in maybe not finishing them too quickly.
It took me a moment there to understand exactly what you mean (not sure why, since your comment is clear).
I think I was always part of this category of people without even realizing, until I read Peter Watts’ books, and in particular Blindsight.
I read hard SF, and I enjoy the genre greatly. But most of it just lacks something that is hard to pinpoint. It’s both something about human psychology, and where the case, especially about the aliens. Not Blindsight, tho. Not at all.
Btw, there’s another hard SF author that I have a huge appreciation for: Ken MacLeod. His style is different, but in my opinion he gets things right too. Some of his books I read multiple times too, and I really don’t do that often, having limited time for reading and being rather picky about what I read.
Ah, autocorrect! Meant to say “Entire communities of people…”
Can absolutely see someone being part of that group before reading/realizing though, Watts/Blindsight is so different but almost “natural”. I used to think it was its unrelenting emphasis on competition, but there’s absolutely more to it as you say in its treatment of psychology, consciousness, alien/different life
I’ve never read Ken Macleod but I’m happy to look into him now, can’t remember ever being disappointed in recommendations given off the back of Blindsight!
"The Things", [0] as mentioned in the featured article itself, is ridiculously relevant. It's the story of The Thing, but told from the perspective of the Thing.
Caution, though, Watts' set and setting is so excessively decadent dark so he probably broke a knob in case of Blindpraxia, where he introduced no less than vampires(!) and failed to explain them properly effectively making them very flexible dei ex machinis to fix otherwise broken plot.
Blindsight worth reading indeed, depiction of scary aliens is excellent there, Echopraxia is completely disappointing disaster movie in the print form. I'm going to point you at The Island novelette and whole Sunflowers series if you can endure its decadent dark set&setting.
Also, importantly, he published part of his work, including full books, for free in multiple electronic formats, here [0].
Refs:
[0]: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm