Starfish by Peter WattsMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."
Clarke stares, quietly repelled.
"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."
Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.
"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"
Many readers of hard SF know Watts by Blindsight, but his first major book is definitely worth reading.
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