Our verdict on Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts: A mixed bag

After watching historical figures travel through time in Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, the New Scientist Book Club headed in the other direction for our latest read, to the far future and some hard science fiction with Adam Roberts’s Lake of Darkness. Taking place in an apparently utopian society, this opens as two spaceships orbit a black hole – only for the captain of one of them to claim he’s been commanded to murder all his shipmates by a voice emanating from the black hole. Not so utopian after all, and via Roberts’ protagonist Saccade, a historian of serial killers from the 21^st century, we soon learn more about this mysterious presence.

This one was a mixed bag for our readers, with some of you really enjoying it and others finding it slow-going. I’m on the side of New Scientist Book Club member Paul Jonas, who writes on our Facebook group that he was “captivated by the story” and “loved the hard sci-fi elements of space travel, black holes and utopian societies”. Paul’s smarter than me – he “also loved the underlying philosophical elements of Deleuze’s thought” in this novel, which I’m not sure I got.

I am a grumpy sort when it comes to fiction and I rarely find myself genuinely amused by books that claim to be funny (Terry Pratchett aside, of course). This wasn’t the case with Lake of Darkness: I was chuckling to myself on all sorts of occasions, and I particularly enjoyed how Roberts’s far-future characters mangled our history, from their deciphering of so-called “more’s code, an Early Modern tik-tak system of long and short pulses, each standing for one glyph” to their singing of that well-known Beatles song, We All Live in a Yellow Sunny Scene.

Like Paul, I was also very intrigued by the book’s portrayal of a utopian future society and the issues it raised. When I chatted to him, Roberts told me he wants to write a novel in all of science fiction’s various subgenres. This was his take on utopia, but even if you take the novel’s antagonist, the Gentleman (or to use his more common name – spoiler alert – Satan), out of it, this utopian vision isn’t very tempting. There’s nothing for anyone to do, as all work has been taken over by “clever machines”. Time is filled with hobbies or fandoms; as the Gentleman puts it: “You people know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. But unless something costs, it’s worthless. The best things cost a lot.” I found it rather enjoyable to feel a little superior to this future society by virtue of having a job (and being able to read).

Book club member Charlotte Cee was another fan, listening to the audiobook and “very much enjoying the humour and the hard science”. “As for life inside a black hole – it’s an interesting one,” she adds. “As one of the characters says, there is certainly energy available, but is there space or time?!”

Barbara Howe wasn’t so sure. Although she enjoyed the “historical misunderstandings” and the “utopian critique” in the book, she felt that “the utopia painted also seems like a very male vision of one, what with all the nudity and inconsequential sex and not one word about the drudgery of child care or even acknowledging the existence of children who have to be trained to fit into the utopian ideals”.

Barbara also brought up a point that bothered a few other readers: she was glad she read Lake of Darkness as an ebook, because she “had to look up more words in this one book than in the last dozen I’ve read put together”. Alan Perrett felt similarly, finding the wide vocabulary and having to look up various terms “a bit off-putting”. Jess Brady was in this team too, loving “the concept” but criticising the “slow prose”.

This wasn’t something I noticed particularly – not because I knew all the words Roberts used, but because (like the hard physics in the book), I tend to let that sort of thing wash over me. As Barbara put it, in reference to the physics of it all: “I treat any description of FTL  (faster than light) flight with the same respect I treat descriptions of time travel: with the assumption that they are there to provide a veneer of scientific respectability on a plot device that’s basically magic. Meaning I usually skim them to see if they’re entertaining – these were that – without putting in any effort to see if the physics makes sense.”

Another criticism from readers was that the characters were unlikeable: Alan wrote that “there wasn’t a single person that I sympathised with or mourned their death. They are all incredibly annoying and foolish.” Karen Seers agreed: “There was enough in the book to grab my interest in the beginning, but I just didn’t develop an interest in a cast of unlikeable characters. I couldn’t care what happened to them at the end.”

Well, that’s something I agree with. The characters are all incredibly silly and some of them – Guunarsonsdottir, I’m looking at you – are just awful. But I felt that was the point, and I enjoyed watching their travails as these cossetted and intellectually lazy people tried to deal with real danger – generally by forming another committee to discuss what to do. And I can’t quibble with the genius of naming a character Bartlewasp. That’s just funny in itself.

Paul felt similarly to me, I think. “Saccade was a great character, ok she is living in a utopia surrounded by AI, so she is going to be a bit coddled. They sort of remind me of characters in Iain M Banks’s Culture stories, except they are not special agents for Special Circumstance so are not so savvy,” he writes. “I don’t find I have to totally identify with characters in a story. I can follow them, without them being total saints or superheroes.”

I finished Lake of Darkness with lots of Capital T Thoughts, many of which I’m still pondering. Did the black hole stuff actually make sense? Did I really understand what happened at the end? I’m still not sure, but I’m enjoying mulling it all over – as is Barbara, who concludes that the novel “went in directions I was not expecting, and was certainly thought provoking”.

“Toward the end, I felt like I was back in the 1980s, trying to make sense of the paradoxes in Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,” she adds. “Thankfully, that didn’t last too long, but I’m still baffled by the ending. I don’t understand why Joyns did what she did. And did the Gentleman get what he wanted, or not?”

Paul is also still puzzling it all out alongside Barbara and I: “The end was perhaps confusing because of the black hole physics,” he writes. “Also the geometry stuff about inside/outside an infinite object was pretty mind bending.”

Let’s move on, though, from black hole physics to gravity for our next read, which is the wonderful Circular Motion by Alex Foster. This brilliant debut novel imagines that the spin of Earth is gradually accelerating, with increasingly devastating effects as days shorten, eventually to just 2 hours. I absolutely loved it and can’t wait to find out what you all think. You can check out an extract from the novel here – it shows you how this speeding Earth is, inevitably, the fault of us humans – and read a piece by Alex here, in which he talks about how the physics of an accelerating Earth would play out. I’ll be talking to him later this month about the novel, so do pop any questions you have for him on our Facebook group.