Watts deviously piggy-backs on the ideas of Blindsight all the way to the sun, then leaps off on a bungee cord for a dive back down the gravity well. That doesn't make sense. Daniel Bruks, a biologist studying animals in the desert, is caught up in a battle between a vampire and her zombies and a hive-mind of cognitively-adapted monks who use a tornado to defend themselves. After the fight, a truce, but the common run of humanity are terrified by the glimpses afforded by the battle into how far these creatures have moved beyond them, and Bruks finds himself in space, headed sunward to the Icarus, which powers a significant portion of the Earth, and is also the last link to the Theseus, lost out in the Oort Cloud. Compared to the augmented and advanced minds around him, Daniel is a roach, but that's not an insult, that's a realistic assessment of his chances of survival.

Hard hard sci fi. Big ideas that takes the obsolescence of the idea of free will completely for granted and works on from there. Survival in a universe where consciousness is a side effect is what's at stake. What exactly we might end might end up as if we survive is a whole other thing.