Lake Of Darkness by Adam Roberts (book review).

‘Lake Of Darkness’ is a standalone literary space opera that ventures into psycho-horror.

Humans have spread far and wide across our galaxy, living in a utopia where “everybody has the opportunity to live in the way that is, to them, most alive. To follow their passion, to feel at home, to achieve or to slack, to explore or to stay at home.” If someone is not happy on the planet they are living on, they can move to one where they can be. All this is supported by “families of AIs.” However, this comes at a cost. People who do not have to strive or struggle to survive or achieve their aims are psychologically more like children. There is a certain naivety or shallowness of character about them. They have clustered themselves into interstellar fandoms—groups of people studying and working on the same area of interest. One such fandom is physics.

This fandom has sent two faster-than-light ships 1,120 light years from Earth to gather data about the black hole nicknamed QV-Tel, such as contouring its event horizon. Captain Raine of the first ship to arrive on station kills all eleven members of his crew. The second ship receives feeds suggesting that Raine killed them because he was told to do so by something from inside the black hole. This is clearly ridiculous, as nothing can escape from inside a black hole’s event horizon.

The second ship’s crew agrees to rescue the clearly mad Raine after sending a message of their intentions to the nearest civilised planets. However, Raine kills all the people on the second ship as well. Eventually, a mission arrives at QV-Tel, captures Raine, and places him in a coma. The only way to communicate with him is through his sim, while his body remains in a quarantined medisheath. Somehow, and the experts do not quite know how, he is corrupting data on his sim and on any computer outside of quarantine.

The historian Saccade has been granted an interview. Her specialist fandom is twentieth-century sociopathic killers. To her, Raine embodies such a person, something not otherwise seen in the utopia, hence her interest. She enters Raine’s sim as a normal person but emerges with her mind corrupted. Somehow, the data in Raine’s sim has taken over parts of her brain, and she ends up committing crimes.

These crimes, as we learn, have a purpose: to release whatever is in the black hole into the universe. The rest of the novel follows her and the corrupting data in their attempt.

Lake of Darkness uses slight corruption of the English language to create the impression of a future existence. For instance, we have “startship” instead of “starship.” It also features experts discussing what really happened in their past, such as the famous words Neil Armstrong said after he set foot on the Moon. The discussion starts off with the real explanation of why “a” is missing in the sentence and then moves on to increasingly absurd reasons. This ambiance of otherworldliness intensifies throughout the novel as Roberts gently guides us to the final denouement.

I felt this would have worked much better had he not insisted on using more rarely used words such as “deliquesce,” “neoplasm,” or “Meissner.” Yes, he does provide some explanations, and these obscure words are the exact ones to fit in with what he wants to portray. Even so, it will leave quite a few readers floundering as there are too many of them.

Turning to the physics and engineering in Lake of Darkness, Roberts has clearly done a lot of research to get the background correct. I particularly liked his use of spacecraft shaped as Meissner tetrahedra, which have some advantages over the more traditional rotating wheels, cylinders, or pods swinging on the ends of arms to induce the sensation of gravity. I hope this becomes as popular an idea as Arthur C. Clarke’s rotating cylinder in Rendezvous With Rama when it was first published. However, his big idea of what lies at the centre of a black hole left me, as a mathematician, so bemused that I had to fundamentally realign my understanding of the novel. It went from “this is really interesting physics that could realistically be extrapolated from what we know now” to “the protagonists have gone mad, and these are their nightmares.” Simple mathematical modelling of black holes points to a singularity at its centre, i.e., infinitely dense matter. An adjustment to that suggests the matter gets denser until a distance of the Planck constant (i.e., very tiny) from the centre is reached. These are extrapolations of available observations, and it is accepted that these mathematical theories will have to be adjusted because they are not physically or philosophically sensible. We just do not know how to adjust them because we do not have the necessary observations.

The characters in Lake of Darkness are well-drawn. I particularly hated Guunarsondottir because she is one of those experts who pretends to have known things all along when clearly she did not. However, in their utopia, there is a due lack of sophistication. The characters tend to be childlike, but with justified reason.

Overall, Lake of Darkness is a politically motivated treatise against trying to reach for utopia, using science as the main argument against it.

Rosie Oliver

August 2024

(pub: Gollancz, 2024. 308 page hardback. Price: £22.00 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-39961-767-3) check out website: https://www.gollancz.co.uk and https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/adam-roberts/lake-of-darkness/9781399617673/