Fiction Reviews
Lake of Darkness
(2024) Adam Roberts, Gollancz, £22, hrdbk, 308pp, ISBN 978-1-399-61767-3
Space opera-ish horror. The black hole HD 167128 or QV-Telescopii, or even QV Tel, is being visited by two human-crewed starships. On the first, the famous physicist Alpha Raine is making experimental observations of the singularity. Long story short, he thinks he has detected intelligence within and is communicating with it (them?)… Then, on the 37th day after his ship's arrival, Raine kills all 11 members of his crew, seals all the airlocks and pushes his ship into a lower, faster orbit around QV Tel. Meanwhile, those on the second ship have to decide what to do and whether or not the intelligence Raine claimed to have detected, and communicated with, was real?
OK, any more of the plot would constitute a spoiler but with regards to other aspects of the novel there was some fairly interesting world-building going on. While the Earth was apparently (it was only referred to, we never visit it) fraught with the same old problems, but that those who had gone to the stars had created a variety of quasi-utopias with general artificial intelligence there ensuring everything worked. Now, don't mistake this for a version of the Culture (don'cha jus' love Iain Banks' Culture?) as Roberts' interstellar future has a very different dynamic. There is possibly more to mine here, but I am not sure that Roberts is that kind of a writer who builds a universe to explore in a number of books.
But I am sympathetic to the idea Roberts touches upon of dumb human brilliance. A couple of year's ago I took our co-founding editor's, Graham's, step-grandson to the Royal Society summer exhibition and got chatting with an electrical engineer demonstrating to school kids a simple grid of logic gates. I expressed surprise that they were using integrated circuits for the gates as all each required were a couple of transistors, capacitors and resistors. For when I was at school, I could build an amplifier, or door buzzer and such, from these components and could explain how electrons 'behaved' as they moved though the circuit. Today, school kids are not expected to learn this but instead to assemble more complicated circuits from ready-made sub-units. So, am I brighter than today's school kids? Or are they brighter than I? Could our future see us advance, yet become more child-like? As a human ecologist (it has been one of my core interests since my environmental science undergraduate days), I am acutely aware of how dependent we are on the international, techno-agrarian complex we have built to sustain our overpopulated global society and how precarious it is with its vulnerability to near-global war or even a run of large, volcanic eruptions in one year undermining the northern hemisphere's growing season. Yet few, if any, understand how it truly works, let alone have the power to keep it going: it is only the collective participation of a disparate global minority that keeps it running, which is why those that would throw a spanner in the works, the likes of Trump, or Putin, are so worrying… I digress (albeit slightly). To return to Lake of Darkness Roberts takes the idea of a dumbed-down highly advanced future to a fascinating level. (Again, no spoilers here.)
Less convincing was Roberts' starship design, and here we get a short info-dump on this early on, but I am not sure that it really added anything to the overall plot arc. Yet it is surely not too much of a reveal to say that the novel's quasi-utopias are not quite perfect: after all Sir Thomas More's book (1516) literally translates from the original Greek as 'no place'. Here there is a firm nod to science fiction fandom: the author is well known to British Eastercon fandom and so the author is playing to the gallery with different human colonies developing their own ideal versions of society while acknowledging, and interacting with, others.
The horror elements, at least at the beginning, are reminiscent of the film Event Horizon (trailer here) and is well done. The SFnal fantasy concept underpinning all of this is engaging. Here there are some intriguing ideas. For example, assuming we go with the SFnal conceit of faster-than-light (FTL) travel, what would happen if we sent an FTL probe to briefly skim the inside of a black hole's event horizon, and what of the information paradox? Such questions Roberts never fully answers – which is probably for the best – but he orbits them very much like his exploration ships do QV Tel. They are interesting questions; they fascinate scientists.
Of course, as scientists into SF (or some of you may be vice-versa folk as both these are this website's unique-selling-point target audience) it is fun to see whether or not an SF author has explored the related science underpinning the SF in devising his/her tale? Here, there is a short author's note at the novel's end and so we find that Adam Roberts struggled with the science finding it 'baffling' but instead used aspects of philosophy to drive this novel's tone and direction. Personally, I find philosophy too wishy-washy, a discipline, giving way too few bangs for its buck, with philosophers more concerned with semantics and such rather than testable hypotheses; I care not for either Hegel or Kant (apparently they inspire some of Roberts' stories) outside of a Monty Python song, but there you go. Roberts not engaging with the science is, though, understandable: he is after all a lecturer in 19th century literature. But I can say that his failure to absorb the underpinning science does not really undermine this novel, which can be considered a science-fantasy horror and an engaging one at that. Although for my money I greatly preferred his previous novel, The This (2022) such is his writings' variety. He is therefore an author well worth checking out and checking out a few of his books, more than one, as some – if not this one – will likely hit the spot you cherish.
For those interested in the related science of black holes, could I point you in the direction of a number of 15 - 25-minute PBS Space-Time videos to which I link below.
Jonathan Cowie
For some background on the science of black holes then check out these PBS Space-Time 15-20 minute videos. You will require reasonable school-level physics and occasionally some first year undergraduate physics maths, but don't worry about this last as their conclusions/implications are explained in an understandable way.
What is on the other side of a black hole?
Normal maps are useless inside black holes. At the event horizon - the ultimate point of no return as you approach a black hole - time and space themselves change their character. We need new coordinate systems to trace paths into the black hole interior. But the maps we draw using those coordinates reveal something unexpected - they don’t simply end inside the black hole, but continue beyond. In these maps, black holes become wormholes, and new universes lie on the other side… You can see the video here.Could the universe be inside a black hole?
What is inside a black hole? Inevitable crushing doom? Gateways to other universes? Weird, multidimensional libraries? If you’ve ever wanted to know then you might be in luck - Some physicists have argued that you’re inside one right now… You can see the video here.Does space emerge from a holographic boundary?
Space seems fundamental. To build a universe, surely you need something to build it on or in. Many, maybe most, physicists now think that the fabric of space emerges from something deeper. And perhaps the most existentially disturbing such proposal is that our 3-D universe is just the inward projection of an infinitely distant boundary. A hologram, or sorts. Let’s see how that can actually work, and what the holographic principle really says about the 'realness' of this universe… You can see the video here.How does gravity escape a black hole?
Fact: in a black hole, all of the mass is concentrated at the singularity at the very centre. Fact: every black hole singularity is surrounded by an event horizon. Nothing can escape from within the event horizon unless it can travel faster than light. Fact: gravity travels at the speed of light. So how does a black hole manage to communicate its gravitational force to the outside universe? How does gravity escape a black hole..? You can see the video here.The black hole information paradox
We have established by now that black holes are weird. The result of absolute gravitational collapse of a massive body: a point of hypothetical infinite density surrounded by an event horizon. At that horizon, time is frozen and the fabric of space itself cascades inwards at the speed of light. Nothing can travel faster than light, and so nothing can escape from below the event horizon – not matter, not light, not even information… You can see the video here.
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