Blindsight’s author, Peter Watts, is a Canadian science fiction writer, working primarily in the hard science fiction genre. In 1991, he earned a Ph.D in Zoology and Resource Ecology from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. He went on to hold several academic research and teaching positions, and worked as a marine mammal biologist. He began publishing fiction around the time he finished graduate school.

Blindsight was published in 2006. It garnered nominations for a Hugo Award for best novel, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science fiction novel, and a Locus Award for best science fiction novel, and won the Seiun Award for best translated novel. The book follows a crew of astronauts sent out to investigate a trans-neptunian Kuiper Belt comet dubbed 'Burns-Caulfield' that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal to an as-yet unknown destination elsewhere in the solar system, followed by their subsequent first contact.