In many ways a story can also be an argument. A chance to explore a subject and come down hard on one side. The War of the Worlds is an alien invasion story, but it can also explore how it feels for a country to be suddenly under threat from a mightier empire colonising it for their own ends. These debates may be subtle or well aimed bricks to our heads – both have their places. Sometimes I think the current world suggests a lot of us weren’t paying that much attention. In Adam Robert’s interesting science fiction novel Lake of Darkness we have a tale of murder, black holes and yet also the dangerous futures that humanity may fall into.

In the far future two spaceships and their crews explore a black hole. But things quickly go wrong when one award winning scientist starts to claim he is speaking to someone inside the black hole. Soon murder strikes both crews and the mysterious Raine is now being sought by a third crew intent on his capture. This desire to cause death seems to be spreading and in a utopia can anyone ever understand evil?

There is a lot to admire in this novel but ultimately, I don’t think it quite pulls its various themes together. Initially it seems to be a very urbane take on Event Horizon as one man goes apparently mad and this time it’s a very peaceful very academic sounding group of people unused to violence that need to stop him. But in this first act a few clues start to emerge that this future is a bit strange. The Nobel prize is now much more commonly awarded and popular voting applies, the teams trying to stop Raine love long dsocusisons and tactics but perhaps we can say kindly show a lack of common sense. As news of Raine’s deeds gets out to other worlds people are horrified and also love the endless debate as to what to do . A historian focused on serial killers is not entirely on board with her subject and indeed we see a future where history isn’t really understood that well Neil Armstrong in some places is a nickname, Beatles Songs with the words not quite right and generally we discover this world has sat on its laurels. A perfect utopia, where AI minds do all the work and humans just exist making themselves busy but not necessarily being productive. Why learn to read, analyse, explore without risk when a mind can do the heavy lifting. There is a lot to say here about a future we could be in many ways devolving into. Great geniuses are actually when you read between the verbose sentences not that bright they just sound good. A world that can’t analyse or do things itself is stagnant. Perhaps idle hands needs the devil to help and apparently he wants to.

Another strand of the story is about black holes and who may be living in a particular one. There is some delicious hard science exploring speed of light, how we could communicate inside a black hole and then we get metaphysical with a character known as The Gentleman who can reference a particular relevant Rolling Stone track and appears to corrupt anyone he talks to. It sets the later stage for conflict for characters trying to stop events and there is a wonderful debate he had towards the end where the limitation of this utopia are explored. This is science fiction full of ideas, playing with its cast and world to make points and make you think. I can never not respect that!

However for me the story does lack much impetus. When most of your cast are thanks to the culture naive verging on the idiotic it’s hard to have sympathy or to care. It’s revealed very early on how stagnant the human race has got that it may have worked better to also show the pluses of a utopia what makes people want to stay as they are. That for me mean the actual story feels more framework to make an argument rather than also tell a story alongside it.

I overall enjoyed Lake of Darkness, I have a lot of sympathy with the case it is making and there are moments of science, culture and philosophy to favour but I just felt it needed a bit more focus and speed to fully make its case. Definitely though for science fiction fans who appreciate books taking some risks this is worth a look.

I hugely enjoyed Adam Roberts "The This" which unfolded a quite audacious cosmology from what appeared to be a rather mundane social network thriller. Lake Of Darkness initially appears to be a much more fantastical setting, with far-future humans in a Culture like Utopia, with faster-than-light travel and artificial intelligences which do most of their thinking for them. There is a background radiation of satire, and Roberts writes in a familiar conversational style to start off with, dripping bits of how the world works as a cheeky reminder to us. And also to slip in, after a few pages of setting up its survey vessels, that the Captain of the first ship suddenly murdered his entire crew. Investigations suggest this is due to some information gleaned from the Black Hole - the Captain said an entity living in the Black Hole, but that's impossible as information cannot come from a black hole (and nothing can live there). This is the start of an oddly structured and yet fascinating book, which does some quite hard philosophy of science work, and takes some massive swings around conservation of information and evolution, while also basically being a sly take on the Star Trek episode Wolf In The Fold.

The central satire in Lake Of Darkness is people continually saying that things that seem demonstrably happening are impossible. It's a classic horror movie trope with the supernatural, here being presented as undiscovered science. The faster-than-light drives which are a mixture of slower-than-light propulsion and time travel are a key example of the slippery nature of language versus reality, which particularly comes up with the mediating AI's The eventual conclusion, while going via a historian working on a 21st Century serial killer and various ideas of information viruses, makes intelligent life, and in this case mankind, an essential part of the Universe's way of dealing with conservation of information. We borrow for the future to deal with the past. Roberts's prose is not for everyone, he often does a big hard science blitz, and the chummy writing style is a little disconcerting to start off with. But very few people are knocking out books of hard science fiction and hard science philosophy like this and I find the, a blast.

In Lake of Darkness, we are introduced to a medium-to-far future human interplanetary society of a Utopian bent - and to the thorny problem of evil, which seems to have been eradicated but proves tenacious.

This is a world of abundance, permitting its members to do pretty much what they want, subject to some basic rules about consent. Effectively people devote themselves to hobbies, forming "fandoms" that act in common to pursue goals. These goals range from art projects to the pursuit of pure science to exploration. We see an attempt by one man to be the first to walk on the surface of the planetary core (Roberts addressing the technical difficulties this presents in some (convincing) detail). The aim is basically status, earned by the acclamation of one's fandom. This is seen as a healthier approach than accruing resources or power.

It's all done with the help of AI, which undertakes the real work. This allows a staggering level of achievement, but it all feels a little empty. The people we meet here reminded me of those in EM Forster's The Machine Stops - they sustain a lively degree of chat and engagement with one another but it all feels brittle, shallow, with the real action taking place elsewhere. Representative of this is that nobody can read, everyone relies on the AIs to translate historic documents, resulting in a whole layer of ignorance and misunderstanding arising from the failure of sounds to represent or differentiate underlying ideas.

It's also a short-attention-span society, one where those AIs don't just speak texts but summarise and recommend them too. As a result the adults in this book are contradictory, at the same time both erudite and childlike. When things begin to go wrong, when the system is challenged, nobody is really able to pull together a response (another echo of Forster, I think?)

In Lake of Darkness, what goes wrong is slightly mysterious. It may be a threat from an Ancient Evil which meddling scientists have unleashed from its prison (cue a great deal of speculation about who or what would be capable of constructing this prison and the paradoxes it builds into the universe). Or it may be that the evil has been loose and ac time for aeons. Or it may be that both things are true, with the evil (possibly not the right term, really) representing a part of humanity that the Utopia has suppressed. We are reminded that there are laws of balance and conservation in the Universe and that therefore, at least in the long run, certain things may be impossible - such as firewalling off areas of experience and motivation. Or, putting it another way, some things may be certain, such as human traits and behaviours surviving.

As presented to the reader, this paradox is framed in terms of the event horizon of a black hole. A couple of futuristic ships arrive, capable of FTL travel, to investigate black hole QV Tel but madness and obsession will soon destroy their crews. There is a great deal of debate, both among the characters of this novel and from the narrator (or narrators - the way the book represents how it is being told is twisty, reminding me of Tolkien in its insistence that it is being translated - but from what and to what and by whom is unclear) about whether it might be possible to communicate with whatever life might exist within a black hole. This apparently abstract point of physics, indeed, motivates characters to extremes, up to and beyond murder. (I enjoyed the way in which Roberts uses his apparently consensual society to show an individual with aberrant views can impose this on the wider culture - the grounding in consensus meaning that there are no real checks in place. It all reminded me of a version of social media gone septic. Sorry, gone even more septic).

This question engages real, unresolved issues of physics but it also, I think, represents the gist of the book. The existence of black holes poses a puzzle whose solution allows for real choices in the design of the universe - it's left deliberately uncertain whether it is this fact that drives a succession of characters in this story to defy, indeed trample, the norms of their civilisation, or whether they have indeed been affected by some kind of serial taint that derives from the black hole itself and is being communicated through society, thereby posing a deep contradiction.

This is a novel of ideas, that debate about the nature of reality coming over as more solid that the rather insipid characters who fail to face up to its consequences. And, just to be clear, by "insipid" I don't mean these are badly or weakly drawn characters, I think Roberts depicts them just as he intends to, they are insipid members of an insipid society which has forgotten things about itself that it ought to to have help on to.

Overall, a riveting and strange book, alive with alternatives and a haunting sense of the past and the future debating with each other.

An almost impenetrable novel that mixes hard SF with philosophy and religion.

Lake of Darkness has a simple enough premise: two ships orbit a black hole - a few hours later and their crews are dead, save for murderer Captain Raine. Raine claims a voice from within the black hole has been talking to him, but of course no one believes him, because nothing comes out of a black hole, does it?

Based on this premise, I thought we'd be getting some sort of space horror and in a way that's not too far from the truth. But from the very beginning, the author presents some very complex ideas without (and why should he have to if he doesn't want to) going easy on the reader. The characters are held somewhat at a distance from a reader, the SF is difficult to understand, and there's something rather passive about the construction of it all.

I had to read about 20% to even have an idea of where the story was going! But there are some interesting ideas in here as well as difficult ones, and I enjoyed exploring them. At this point in history, humanity is doing well for itself. Everyone seems to live in relative harmony, following the hobbies they're interested in (their fandoms), and asking the AIs for information whenever they want it. There's very little crime, Raine's murders aside. But on the downside, there's not much historical knowledge, either. Everyone's giving up on reading - why bother when the AI's can do it for you. So childhood books become Alias in Wonderland instead of Alice. A song about a yellow submarine turns into one about 'a sunny sunny scene'.

No one has to work for anything - and this is where I think one of the main messages of the book comes in. We've all heard the phrase 'without sorrow there is no joy' and this book extrapolates from there. If there's no effort and strife, what can we really achieve? In Utopia, what might we miss out on? What might we be blind to?

I liked this element but I did get rather lost again towards the end. But maybe my brain is the limiting factor!

I enjoyed the mental exercise but I think I'd be very careful in recommending this to others.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital ARC!

Aww, man, I was excited to read this. The blurb sounded fantastic and slightly horror-esque - what's in the black hole that's caused a man to murder everyone and almost caused someone else to do the same when investigating?

Unfortunately, I ended up DNF'ing this unbelievably fast because of the writing style. I felt like I was reading a textbook and needed a degree in astrophysics or something. I enjoy sci-fi and even hard sci-fi, but this felt like a level above that. Every sentence felt ridiculously convoluted, and I genuinely struggled to understand the basic points that were being brought across to me. Not to mention that what I did understand made me go, 'huh?'.

From what I understood, the two ships researching the black hole have different engines. One is meant to be faster than the other but causes more issues for the crew. Yet it only got there...a few days before the other one? So what's the point?! Why would you make your crew sick for the sake of a few days? Again, this is just what I understood, and I could easily have been wrong because the prose was so unbelievably dense.

This is really sad for me. I thought the blurb had so much potential, but it lost me so fast.

I'm afraid i couldn't read the book.
I tried.
The language is impossible, archaic, clunky, and doesn't flow. I read and read, yet nothing made sense and i felt like a 6 year old reading slowly with their thumbs following the words one by one.
The author is a professor of 19th century literature, and it reads a lot like that.

‘"Afternoon’ was calibrated according to ship-time, which was synchronized between the two ships. An arbitrary frame of temporal reference of course, but important for crew wellbeing."

What he tried to say there is:

" Shiptime was synchronised between the two ships. The clocks shown it was afternoon, which was as good a time as any for reference's sake."

Now, isn't that better?
Maybe not.

Another one (both quotes appear within the first 2 pages):

"The β in the latter ship’s designation indicated that this startship circumnavigated Einstein’s restrictions on faster-than-light travel by the more recently developed technologies of rapid spacetime bubbling – trillions upon trillions of bubbles, 10 ^ 20 each fractosecond, all cascadingly superposed a planck-length apart, sweeping the craft through actual spacetime at immense apparent velocity."

If this made sense to you, then i highly recommend you read it as it was written for you.