Paul Di Filippo Reviews Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1399617673, hardcover, 320pp, £22.00) July 2024

The newest novel from Adam Roberts—purveyor of endless unrepeating and unduplicatable narratives—is a utopian metaphysical suspense/thriller space opera—which also happens to be a commentary, I think, on progressive culture and progressive SF. Now, if you imagine that’s an ill-assorted congeries of tropes and styles and themes, you are underestimating the powers of Mr. Roberts. He weaves every strand into a beautiful organic tapestry, as if we were watching a balletically graceful collaboration between Stephen King, James Blish, Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson.

We are a few thousand years into the future, and humanity peacefully bestrides the galaxy. There are no other sentient species to contend with, and the economy is post-scarcity. “Humankind had disposed itself into…many collectives in a wonderful heterotopia.” The sources of cultural evil have been identified and eliminated: “…possessiveness, testosterone and boredom…. [Citizens cultivate] their Voltairean gardens…in arts and science, in gaming and sports, in exploration and sex, in cosplay and crafts and cataloguing. Whatever it may be, there is a community fascinated by it, a welcoming context…”. And in fact, each area of whimsical interest is not a profession, but a “fandom.” One character compliments another: “You’re an esteemed part of physics fandom.”

Every personage we meet is peaceful, respectful, well-adjusted, smart and curious. (With one major exception, whom we’ll encounter below.) And they are all equally helpless, about to be steamrollered by that precise cosmic quality, Evil, which they have attempted to banish.

Two starships orbit, at a safe distance, a black hole designated QV Tel. The crews of each are composed of scientists hopeful of learning new things. One man, Raine, tries to peer past the event horizon of the black hole, to actually extract data from the “lake of darkness.” Much to his surprise, he finds himself communicating with an apparent inhabitant of the singularity! The being calls himself “the Gentleman,” and we will soon learn that the Gentleman is literally Satan, imprisoned in QV Tel by God after Satan’s Fall. Whether to believe the Gentleman’s account of himself is of course a quandary.

Raine has no defenses against Satan’s insinuations and beguilements, and he has soon turned into a serial killer, wiping out every fellow crewmember in horrible fashion. The companion ship decides to mate their vessels, enter the abattoir, and bring Raine to justice. Before you can say “John Wayne Gacy,” they are all slaughtered too.

News of this disaster filters back to the Ekumen. (Roberts’s polity is not literally called the Ekumen, but I use that term for a reason.) Raine is eventually captured and taken back to civilization. His disfigured and rotting and mutating but undying body is encased prophylactically, and his mind is set loose in a small virtuality. A young female historian named Saccade decides she would like to interview Raine for her thesis. Bad idea.

Saccade emerges from the VR interview with murderous compulsions and a sourceless desire to go to another world and meet the performance artist named Berd. Berd’s latest shtick involves him visiting the literal center of his planet. (Roberts has great Besterian fun with this extended side trip.) Saccade obtains from Berd a gravity-inversion device and flees to QV Tel.

Our POV and cast change for the last time. A new mission has been commissioned to chase Saccade, because they expect she will use the gravity-inversion device to explode the black hole and release whatever is inside. Our main focus here is a young female physicist named Joyns, humble and thoughtful, who is assistant to a famous senior scientist, Guunarsonsdottir (as well as being the dogsbody and sex partner of the elder figure). Joyns and her mentor set out with a well-delineated crew under Captain Razak. We inhabit Joyns’s POV mainly, and as rivalries and feuds flourish among the once-placid crew, we follow her down into the cosmological rabbit hole where dwells the Gentleman.

I said at the beginning that there is a definite self-reflexive subtext of commenting on progressive SF here, and the key to it all is Guunarsonsdottir. She is the perfect exemplar of Le Guin’s brilliant female scientists, except that she is batty, egomaniacal, contentious, mean-spirited, hateful, and often wrong. I know Le Guin has featured protagonists who are genius female physicists, but I’ll be darned if I can—after considerable searching—pinpoint the stories where they feature. So let’s call Guunarsonsdottir a gender-swapped Shevek from The Dispossessed. Every time she appears in the narrative, it’s a Dickensian slapstick farce—but with deadly consequences. And in fact the whole heterotopia that Roberts envisions maps onto Le Guin’s Annares.

The critique Roberts launches against his heterotopia (and by extension all similar ones in SF) emerges from the lips of the Gentlemen, so there’s always a space to question its truthfulness. The Gentleman tells Joyns that she lives in a “hobbytopia.” “You live in a place without true work, and since work is what shaped you as a species in the first place you find yourselves adrift. Accordingly you have reverted to infancy. A sexualized infancy of course, since you are physiologically adult…. Your machines tend you, as actual adults used to tend their toddlers…”

This of course is one of the classic themes of SF, ranging from The Time Machine through The City and The Stars to The Matrix. Humanity becomes too decadent to survive the challenges of the universe. Hubris clobbered by nemesis, to employ Aldiss’s famous formulation.

The orgy of killing and calamity that befalls this mission too, portrayed with verve and cunning by Roberts, tends to bear out the Gentleman’s critique.

Robert’s smooth, seductive prose in this novel displays his trademark playfulness and creativity. The deepest philosophical and stefnal passages go down like a cool drink in the desert.

Exactly like the cool drink with which, the Gentleman alludes, he tempted Jesus in the desert.

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