Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson

What a find this book was. Hot on the heels of re-reading Robert Charles Wilson’s The Chronoliths, I got hold of this. Blind Lake is a fascinating science fiction mystery/thriller with a theme very close to my heart: the technological sublime.

I must say at the outset that this book isn’t without flaws, though I would put those flaws down to faults with the edition rather than with the writing. The blurb on the back names a couple of the characters (fair enough), except one of them is completely wrong (and not mentioned in the book at all). There are other instances where you can detect the joins, as if a section of the story was written a long time after the previous section, and the pieces don’t quite knit together perfectly.

Neither of these flaws are serious, and don’t spoil the overall experience, which is one of those where you are enjoying the book so much that you wish it were twice as long.

Blind Lake is the name of a secure scientific facility. The people who work there are monitoring, interpreting and analysing the output of artificially intelligent quantum computers. The AIs have both designed and programmed themselves, and (somehow) they are relaying to earth scenes from a planet over 50 light years away. The scientists can see the data, but they don’t understand how they got it; they know the AIs are working, but they don’t understand how they work. Some sceptics wonder if what they are seeing is even real: perhaps the machines are just dreaming.

The idea of technology that works in spite of the fact that we don’t understand it is dear to my heart. It’s actually quite a common phenomenon, if you think about it. Thirty years ago, most of us could master the workings of the internal combustion engine, to an extent. We could service our own cars, that kind of thing. These days, few of us could. Many, many people use computers and gadgets that they are helpless to fix – or troubleshoot – if they go wrong. Only a minority of people are competent enough around computers to diagnose and fix simple software problems.

Quite often you learn the basics of a new device, promising yourself that you’ll learn all of the ins and outs as soon as you can. But you never do. I was dismayed this weekend when I realised that I didn’t know how to switch of the auto power save feature on my camcorder. Maybe you can’t, but I don’t know that for sure.

Wilson takes this idea a few logical steps into the future. Some technological wonders are just that, and even the technologists at the cutting edge don’t really understand them. Even the most high-placed scientists are at a loss to explain their workings. Into this scene step a number of characters. Some of them are gentle souls, drawn together by circumstances. The story of these gentle souls is very touching. They include a troubled adolescent girl, a writer, the girl’s mother – a scientist – and The Subject: an alien 51 light years away who is to focus of the observations, and who seems (at times) to be aware that he is being observed.

These characters are thrown together by circumstances. They are isolated from the outside world, and estranged from the society around them. They find each other, and the connections they forge are at the heart of the mystery in Blind Lake. Wilson structures the story brilliantly, shifting points of view, setting and then shifting scenes, leaving as much unsaid as said. I really enjoyed this: highly recommended.

Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo and The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

I recently reread a couple of SF novels I’ve bought over the past couple of years. They were all writers I’d not really encountered before, at least two of which were from Amazon Recommends. I have spent hours trying to train the Amazon Recommends algorithm, and it’s still mostly hopeless, except when it comes to a certain strand of science fiction.

The Chronoliths, by Robert Charles Wilson, is a superb example of how great science fiction can be, and how it can be both about our lives and times, people and relationships, and also contain a deeply interesting mystery which you care about and want to see resolved. What’s interesting to me about The Chronoliths is that it doesn’t feature a single alien. So, were it to be filmed, there would be no need for muppet-like creatures, or el cheapo CGI giant spiders with strangely human facial features.

That great SF sense of wonder can be created without aliens. They’re just not needed. First and biggest mistake of most TV Sci Fi is that the producers somehow think that SF = Aliens. There are honorable exceptions, like Survivors and quite a lot of The X Files, but not many. And even The X Files let itself down when it came to the film. Yes, some good science fiction features aliens, but they’re hard to realise on film – there are plenty of alternative sources that do not.

In The Chronoliths, giant monuments appear out of nowhere, apparently sent back through time to celebrate a military victory some years in the future. Brilliant premise. So the whole of the human race then becomes obsessed with how this future war comes to take place, who wins, and how the monuments are sent back. More and more arrive, and the world descends into convincing chaos. The narrative voice is that of a sorry (as in he feels sorry) slacker, who spends his life trying to compensate for his earlier failures, and finds himself – against his will and against his instincts – caught up in events.

This story could be so easily filmed. The only CGI would be the relatively trivial presentation of the monolithic structures, and if you wanted to push the boat out, you could portray the appearance of one of them in real time, as it were. Everything else is all about people, about relationships, and about ideas.

Ship of Fools, by Richard Paul Russo (also published, for some reason, as Unto Leviathan, so don’t be confused) is one of the current vogue of extreme SF – projecting the human race impossibly far into the future in the contemporary take on the traditional space opera. (Note that it’s essential for science fiction writers to have three names – like assassins.) The thing to note about the modern space opera is that the main difference is one of pessimism. In the Golden Age, they somehow thought that humanity would be on its way to the stars by the end of the 20th Century. Now it’s generally acknowledged that the only way we’ll head off for the stars is if we are forced into it, and that it might not happen for several thousands of years.

The brilliant premise of Ship of Fools is that the people on the generational star ship (one in which people live out their entire lives for generation after generation as it makes its slow way across the galaxy) have forgotten why they set out in the first place. The ship seems to have some kind of religious purpose, since it contains a huge cathedral complete with stained glass windows, but nobody knows for sure. They’ve forgotten why they set out, and they have huge conflicts about what exactly they’re supposed to be doing – a bit like, you know, us. So, yeah, it’s all about people, and it’s about relationships, but it’s about religion, ideas, politics, and it sets up a mystery – or several mysteries – which the writer forces the reader to work very hard to solve. Most of all, it remembers to include that sense of wonder that makes the best science fiction tick. They detect a signal from a planet in a star system and go to investigate. What they find there is as horrifying as it is mysterious. What happens next is unpredictable, creepy, and gripping.

One of the classic recurring ideas of SF is the mysterious deserted space ship. “Diving into the Wreck” by Kristine Katherine Rusch is a recent favourite in this genre. It’s the Marie Celeste story, of course, but in hard vacuum. After leaving the planet they find a silent, deserted, probably alien space vehicle. And they’ve never – in all their hundreds of years of travel – encountered any alien life at all.

As they explore the alien ship, a series of accidents lowers morale and increases conflict – until the climax, at which point we get a hint that the ship isn’t deserted at all. But we don’t see the aliens. We just see what they do. Because great science fiction is about ideas – and people, and relationships.

I could go on. It bugs me that this genre – which has a long and respectable history in print – is constantly undermined and disrespected by those who make films and tv programmes. They even claim themselves to be SF fans, but they so rarely produce anything approaching the best of written SF that I despair. Obviously, in both these examples, the thing, the maguffin, is only a vehicle for the ideas, but the difference between these and the Bad Sci Fi of TV is that the ideas are interesting, sometimes mysterious, and always fascinating. People from 1953 would find 2006 shocking and bewildering in many ways, but in others, er, not is one way you could sum up the recent so-called “adult-themed” Torchwood. How is faith, and how are people, affected when they lose all moral compass and encounter unthinkably alien
ideas or artefacts and have no prior experience or resources to draw upon? is one way you could sum up both Ship of Fools and The Chronoliths.

I know which I prefer.