Amazing Sci fi story, gripping and dark

Great storytelling, great scientific speculation, interesting futuristic characters, amazing utopian society with flaws. Space travel, black holes, philosophy and spirituality. Some dark and violent themes, but really gripping.

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Mind bending dark fun

Quite a narrative rollercoaster, full of twists and so well read. Lots to think about and there are the most enjoyable bits of mangled pop culture, literary and historical references embedded throughout from Joyce to the Rolling Stones, fairy tales to science. Really enjoyed this.

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Gripping original sci-fi

This is a really interesting mix of hard sci-fi, horror, mystery and an existential thought experiment on what it is to be good or evil. Think Stanislaw Lem's Fisaco with a dose of Event Horizon all done with a wry smile, genius!

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How much more science fiction could it be? None, none more science fiction

I listened to this on audiobook – excellently narrated by Matt Addis. So this is a review of the heard experience, which is a challenging way to take on a Roberts book. The tension between the momentum of the streaking comet of a plot and the gravity of the spiral galaxy full of ideas is more easily resolved in favour of the plot in an audiobook. If I’d read it conventionally I would have probably digested more of the ideas and emerged an even wiser and more thoughtful person but I don’t think I’d have enjoyed it as much, certainly not in the conventional ripping good yarn sense. And there is a fair bit of ripping, of the Jack sort.
What it’s about? Again, with Robert's writing that isn’t answered easily. In the most basic sense it’s about a utopian interstellar human society where work has been delegated to AI, leaving human activity to coalesce around fandoms – physics, history, whatever. Nothing is impelling progress other than curiosity. Need, threat, difficulty have all been either diverted or diminished, aggression is almost unheard of.
So it is that a scientific fandom comes upon a black hole and is intrigued to detect messages coming from within it. When the crew member in receipt of these messages goes apparently mad and slaughters his fellow explorers, the story unfolds through the eyes of serial (killer) protagonists, narrator.
The book has a compelling story but it is also replete with ideas – philosophical, scientific, literary. I suspect it would take a close conventional reading to start understanding most of the scientific ideas in particular, but that doesn’t matter. The ideas work as the familiar decorations of a space opera and don’t impede the plot. I should imagine they also work as ideas in themselves but I didn’t have the intellectual bandwidth to process them all on first hearing. Is this science? It sounds like it. It may be it. You might know better than me.
Lake of Darkness isn’t, of course a space opera. What is it? Science fiction. SCIENCE FICTION. SCIENCE FLIPPING FICTION! Again, to borrow a trope from the book itself, this could be both the ur-text of science fiction or its latest encompassing expression. It’s a black hole of a book that has sucked in all the SF there ever was and condensed it into a literary singularity of huge density. If someone were to ask, ‘what is science fiction?’, you could give them this as an answer. I don’t have anywhere near Roberts’s depth of reading in SF but here you’ll find echoes, and more than echoes, of Verne, Wells, Lem, Ballard, Bram Stoker, Star Trek (Q?), Le Guin and a whole bunch of others. I mean, a journey to the centre of the earth.
This was a terrific book that works well in the audiobook format. I think it would work differently as a read text. It would certainly benefit from rereading or even study. Prof Roberts is a prof and there is much here for students of literature or philosophy to chew on. For the less intellectually engaged amongst us, and I count myself in that number, there’s a great story to enjoy, a little hard science to absorb and – a must for many SF fans – new and fun invented technologies.

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good

Genuine horror at times, some interesting ideas explored. Intrigued enough to read more by this writer.

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