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Sci-Fi Books Media Space Book Reviews

Blind Lake 121

Posted by timothy from the visualaqua dept.
Tom Alaerts writes "I discovered Robert Charles Wilson because of the curiosity-inducing Slashdot review of his previous novel, The Chronoliths. I had read a lot of SF in the past but over the last 10 years I drifted away from the genre. The Chronoliths sparked my interest again, and this was largely because Wilson, next to an interesting story, gives a lot of attention to the character development. I really liked the deliberate pacing of the book (I can understand that some might find it slow), following the characters through a carefully constructed story. It made me curious about his other works such as Darwinia or the short story collection The Perseids. And now Wilson's new novel Blind Lake is available." Read on for his review.
Blind Lake
author Robert Charles Wilson
pages 399
publisher Tor
rating 8/10
reviewer Tom Alaerts
ISBN 0765302624
summary A book about alien contact and the difficulty of interpretation

Blind Lake takes place in a close future and deals with alien contact and the difficulty of interpreting alien behavior. If you don't want to read further (but I will not include real spoilers, only the setting of the book), I can already summarize as follows: if you liked The Chronoliths or Darwinia, then you will like Blind Lake.

In the book, Blind Lake is one of two locations with an ultra-advanced telescope. This device doesn't work optically, and in fact nobody really understands exactly how it works (there is some amusing technobabble in the book about infinite complexity, adaptive self-programming and the like -- you know the drill), since it was invented accidentally. Anyway the result is that with this telescope, scientists can examine the surface of very far planets in great detail, they can even track an intelligent alien being through its daily life. The book follows Marguerite, a team leader at Blind Lake, her ex-husband, her young daughter (who suffers from a mild personality disorder), and a team of journalists. Marguerite leads a team of "interpreters," which leads to plenty of interesting discussions on how difficult this work is -- it is almost impossible to write the life story of the alien, since we tend to map what we observe to our own habits. Is the alien admiring the view or is he enjoying the air pressure? Etc, etc. Already from the very start of the story, Wilson injects a thriller element: Blind Lake goes into quarantine, with robot drones guarding the perimeter. Nobody knows why. Did something happen with the other telescope? Why are all data streams blocked?

Blind Lake is written with the same attention to detail as The Chronoliths, and the characters are equally well developed. There isn't much adventurous action in the book; it is built rather like a mystery novel with thriller elements, interjected with several interesting ideas. The pacing is similar to that of The Chronoliths. Wilson takes time to flesh out his characters and various background details. I like this thoughtful approach. Towards the end, various new ideas are introduced which are bigger in scope than the original storyline.

While I liked the almost metaphysical (even somewhat new age) concepts introduced in the later chapters, I actually preferred the original storyline (I had the same feeling with Darwinia, which evolves from an alternative history novel into a totally different story). Still, this is only a minor issue and most SF readers will experience a great deal of satisfaction with this book.

I would score Blind Lake 8/10. As a comparison with other Wilson books: I think it's as good as The Chronoliths, while I would rate Darwinia as a 7/10.

Interesting links

You can purchase Blind Lake from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Blind Lake

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  • I really liked the deliberate pacing of the book (I can understand that some might find it slow), following the characters through a carefully constructed story. Slow? It makes Ayn Rand novels look like a choose your own adventure.

  • Anyway the result is that with this telescope, scientists can examine the surface of very far planets in great detail, they can even track an intelligent alien being through its daily life.

    Sounds like the ultimate unreality show.

  • I have always wondered... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by watzinaneihm ( 627119 ) on Friday September 12, 2003 @12:27PM (#6943522) Journal
    Light emanating from earth really does'nt die out, right? So if it was possible for us to either travel faster than light or warp space time into a circle and then get a powerful enough telescope, then we should be able to see events from the past, right?

    That is travel faster than light, to a long distance, turn around and then look at earth with a powerful telescope, we should be able to see kennedy getting shot? wouldnt we? Or maybe bend spacetime so that all the light which left earth years ago comes back to earth ?
    • I think that was a major "plot device" in Battlefield Earth (the book) to determine the actual fate of the Psyclos...
    • If it wasn't for those pesky laws of physics.

      You'd need a telescope with a mirror several light-years across the see the Kennedy assassination now. (Even if you could travel faster than light, which you can't.) Constructing such a thing is problematic, to say the least.

      • You'd need a telescope with a mirror several light-years across the see the Kennedy assassination now.

        Given that the poster already is postulating travel at v > c, is it not unreasonable to also assume a telescope based on a design other than our lens- or mirror-based technology? For example, he/she might use some sort of gravitational lensing technology to focus the collected light.

        Also, c as a cosmological speed limit has come into a share of contraversy from what I've been reading lately. Granted,

        • Granted, we're a long way from "travelling" at v > c, but there have been experiments that appear to accelerate light past c.

          Sooo... What we've got is light that travels faster than light?

          Dont mind me, Im tired and I couldnt help it ;)
    • Light emanating from earth really does'nt die out, right?

      Sure it does, if you assume the universe is infinate, eventually it's going to be blocked by a planet or moon or asteroid or nebula or sucked into a black hole or some kind of magical space jibber jabber.

      Space is only mostly empty.
      • Sure it does, if you assume the universe is infinate, eventually it's going to be blocked by a planet or moon or asteroid or nebula or sucked into a black hole or some kind of magical space jibber jabber.

        Why would you assume it's infinite, though? Most of the scientific community at this point agrees it's finite but unbounded, don't they?

        The advantage of that theory is that it gives me an equally valid claim on the being the center of the universe as anyplace else.

        • Well, then the light hits the wall at the end of the universe. Either way, a straight line couldn't extend infinitely.

          Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.
          • No, finite but unbounded. There is no edge; the light goes on forever, but if you could go faster than light, you'd end up where you started eventually.

            And, since there is not infinite mass, there may be some paths that never intersect an object. Since the universe is expanding, there are more of them over time, not less.
      • Magical space jibber jabber?

        "I ain't gettin' on no space shuttle, fool!"

        Grab.
    • It's a nice thought experiment, to be sure. One, in fact, that I've used many times to assist in teaching rudimentary physics to children and, for instance, my wife.
    • This is true, but remember, there's always that nasty square/cube law. Thus, for your example, Kennedy's assassination occurred in 2003. That's 50 years ago, so you'd have a bubble 50 lightyears in radius from which you could see the event. Remember, that's fifty lightyears and no less (barring such events such as light circling around a black hole, much like water around a sink's drain, before escaping to continue on)-- you can only see the assassination if you're 50 light years out. Or 51 next year, 5

    • That is travel faster than light

      Ever heard of a scientist named Einstein? He wrote of a very important theory: Relativity.

      And one of the major points of this theory is that the speed of light is an absolute. You cannot go faster. You can't even REACH light-speed if you have any mass, because that would require an infinite amount of energy.

      There are other things that might allow you to get there before the light. A wormhole, being a "hole" in space-time joins two places so they are very close through the

      • > He wrote of a very important theory:

        Look up what a theory is. Its not a law. Just the best guess based on current observations. It doesn't meant that it its really is impossible to move faster than light, its just what we think now.
        • At some point, you need to move beyond the "best guess" and realize that it's valid. There is at this point no theory or observation that doesn't validate relativity.

          Which means we have to assume that it's valid. Just like I know the Sun may not come up tomorrow morning, since my belief is just based on induction, but to actually fear it might not come up, or to argue a point based on that possibility, is just childish and not very contructive. I know relativity might be wrong. I'm just putting that aside

          • There is at this point no theory or observation that doesn't validate relativity.

            Its a wild and wacky world out there. [wolfram.com]

            rather than trying to build arguments on some superstition or some science-fiction belief.

            All scientific theories were once wacky out-there beliefs. Instead of saying "What are you an idiot thinking you can break some well accepted theory! Conform, damn you!", perhaps you should explain why they are wrong.

            Everthing is a theory until is proven wrong.
            • Tachyons? Come on, these are a pretty wild conjecture, and the fact that their existence would violate special relativity tells me that they most likely do not exist, instead of believing that special relativity can't be true because tachyons might exist.

              All scientific theories were once wacky out-there beliefs.

              To those who didn't understand them, maybe, but to other scientists they're not. There's a difference between "wacky" and "widely disbelieved".

              I'm not saying I'm not ready to believe a different t

              • >Tachyons? Come on, these are a pretty wild conjecture,

                So therefore we should reject it? "Its too crazy therefore its wrong"? Is that your scientific reasoning?

                >and the fact that their existence would violate special relativity tells me that they most likely do not exist, instead of believing that special relativity can't be true because tachyons might exist.

                So you accept one theory over another because you favour it? A personnal preference? Are you arbitarily chosing to ignore a theory, just l

        • One of the alternate theories to General Relativity is Lorentzian Relativity [geocities.com]. It doesn't require (or indeed, perhaps, allow) time to run backwards, or time to stop, which also doesn't leave us in the lurch the same way trying to imagine what a 0 or -n result from General Relativity means.

          Tom Van Flandern [metaresearch.org] uses it to postulate FTL behavior of gravity and electromagnetic effects. Electromagnetic effects include the deflection of particles based on the other particle's "actual location" (as would be based on a

    • Hmmm, let me see. First common light doesn't propagate in a straight line, it goes in all directions (module obstacles), so the intensity from a light source decreases with the square of distance. Second a object is visually smaller accoding to the distance, so we can estimate the Earth size from forty light years:

      (radius of Earth * 2) / (40 light years) = 3.37090051 x 10-11 [google.com]

      This is the arc in the sky from a disc with Earth's diameter from 40 light years. Roughly this is the fraction of the original ene
      • First, it would dissipate beyond any possible measure by this point.

        If the impact of photons were infinitely divisible then we could just read the disturbances in the waves as they continue to propogate here on earth, no reason to travel anywhere.

        Just try figuring out the aperture on a camera located 50 light years away. You'll need a small opening in order to filter out the rest of the universe's light.

        Alternately you could put your camera in Utah, which is roughly 40 years behind the rest of the US.
    • I guess if you had a rather large gravity well and could curve the light back at the source, you could make it do a 180 deg turn and thus see the past. We just have to find the right black hole and look close to it.

  • Slow? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bendebecker ( 633126 ) on Friday September 12, 2003 @12:29PM (#6943542) Journal
    It's sad that people's attention spans have dropped to the point that just the thought of a book being slow is enough to drive ppl away. I bet if someone a hundred years ago picked up the book, they would say it was lightning fast.
  • NOT! For a much better book on Aliens watching us try Armageddon, the Musical [amazon.com]. Guaranteed to raise more than a chuckle.
  • Darwinia is quite good, with a surprising twist about halfway through and yet another twist at the end. In a way it reads like three different books. I recommend it highly.
    • Must say that I thought Darwinia was a terrible disappointment. Fantastic set-up, and even the twist was interesting, but then ... it just got silly. Incomprehensibe character motivations, illogical extrapolations from the premises, and worst of all, the abandonment of all the interesting story shoots from the beginning of the book.

      I enjoyed the first half of Darwinia, but the second half made me hate it.

  • Never never never again... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dread_ed ( 260158 ) on Friday September 12, 2003 @12:42PM (#6943678) Homepage
    ...will I read a /. review of a fiction book.

    As an entertainment form, I value reading higher (WAY higher) than movies and television. Combine that with a fickle disposition for genre and style and the result is that there are too few fiction books that will satisfy me. The last thing I need is some amateur wack job disclosing the whole plot in a "review" and ruining the book entirely.

    IMHO, the "review" that I am referring to should have been removed faster than a goatse link on the main page labeled "microsoft goes bankrupt."

    Thanks for the reviews guys, but fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice and I'll have to murder you and your whole family with a pack of silly straws and a cantaloupe.

    • Re:Never never never again... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I am the reviewer of the book.
      Rest assured, your frustration is unfounded. When it comes to plot details, I basically presented what you can read on the first few pages and on the dustjacket, plus only a few of the many ideas in the book.
      I think it would be very difficult to write a meaningful review if you can't mention anything at all about the story.

      best regards, Tom
      • My apologies for the ambiguity, but I was referring to another review which I had thought I linked to in my post.

        Unfortunately, I did not preview after editing.

        The link is here now: Decipher review [slashdot.org]

        I have not read your review (nor will I read a reveiw on /. again, like I stated in my post), and I ment no offense to you personally or professionally.

        In addition I would like to commend you on your integrity. Your reply to my post was controlled, intelligent, and non-confrontational considering what was

    • The book flaps contain MORE spoilers! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I checked the book flaps on amazon.com, these are actually more detailed than the reviewer's (probably on purpose) quite vague description of the story beginning.
      The reviewer could maybe just have said "Blind Lake takes place in a close future and deals with alien contact and the difficulty of interpreting alien behavior", but would that be enough to form an opinion?
      In short, maybe you're overreacting a little...
    • I read the chronoliths, and I must say.. it was perhaps the worst book I've ever read. Not just due to the fact that the plot lept about like an inebreated baboon, nor that the ending was "just plain crappy"(tm) but the fact it was disappointing. The concept was clever and held such promise, and the author did absolutely nothing with it. I only ended up with the feeling that he rushed to get this out in order to plant his flag as the first book to use this concept.

      If The Chronoliths was an example of Ro
    • If you are so 1337 why don't you try and post some intelligent comments.

      I looked at your other /. contributions an this silly rant is, at 2, one point higher that every other comment you posted.

      Maybe the "review" was just to bring a special author to the attention of a bigger crowd. I personally enjoy reviews as I get pointers among the higher ranked comments to authors that I might like.

  • The Sparrow (Score:4, Informative)

    by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Friday September 12, 2003 @12:42PM (#6943681)
    Another fairly recent sci-fi book that tackles the problems in interpreting alien behavior is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow [amazon.com]. The book follows a technician at SETI who discovers an alien signal from a nearby star and eventually is drafted onto the first mission to explore this newly discovered civilization. Interestingly the spaceship and crew is provided by the Jesuits.

    That may sound odd, but this is an exceptionally fine book with well-developed characters and a compeling story. Russell is an anthropologist by training and her understanding of what it means to encounter a truly alien society and the consequences of that are profound and impactful.

    Highly recommended if the wider implications of Blind Lake appeal to you, or you enjoy thought-provoking literature.

    • Re:The Sparrow (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KnightStalker ( 1929 )
      I'll second the recommendation for this excellent book. I appreciated the religious themes more than the sci-fi aspects, though, and I'm an atheist. Most of the SF elements were fairly realistic. Without revealing too much, the alien society and the humans' interaction with it sort of serves as a very loose metaphor for the Christian myth of God's relationship to humans, but you should really read the whole book before thinking about what it means. Also, definitely check out the sequel, Children of God.

      • Re:The Sparrow (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mooncaller ( 669824 )
        Like SJ in space? Try James Blish's "A Case of Conscience". Its old style SF, short and sweet, and will make you think.
      • I'll second the recommendation for this excellent book. I appreciated the religious themes more than the sci-fi aspects, though, and I'm an atheist. Most of the SF elements were fairly realistic. Without revealing too much, the alien society and the humans' interaction with it sort of serves as a very loose metaphor for the Christian myth of God's relationship to humans, but you should really read the whole book before thinking about what it means. Also, definitely check out the sequel, Children of God.

        I
    • Russell is an anthropologist by training and her understanding of what it means to encounter a truly alien society and the consequences of that are profound and impactful.

      I had read that and had high hopes for the book, but personally, I found it quite disappointing. While it does some a couple of good characters and the seeds of some very interesting ideas, about 2/3 of the book is spent not on the alien society, but on the process of choosing the crew (rather unbelievable), who's pining after who on bo
    • Truly excellent, but needs to be read with the next novel _The Children of God_ to really understand the first novel. Deals with serious issues far more realistically than is usual.
    • This "interpretation of alien cultures" theme reminds me a lot of Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky", which uses "golden age translation" as a plot device to make aliens seem more human to the reader than the humans do.


      Except in reverse, I guess.

  • unless they're in front of their computers without a shirt and sweat droplets dripping down while waiting for an IM to pop up, eating cheetos with one hand and flipping pages with their big toe on their left foot.
  • I would score Blind Lake 8/10. As a comparison with other Wilson books: I think it's as good as The Chronoliths, while I would rate Darwinia as a 7/10.

    I read Darwinia last week, and I think the reviewer here is underrating it. Then again, I also thought that the giant midbook twist (which he complains about above, and which I won't spoil here) was possibly the best part.

  • tag error (Score:2, Informative)

    by mzs ( 595629 )
    Maybe an editor will notice this post and fix the article.

    In the source for the end of the article:

    I would score Blind Lake 8/10. As a comparison with other Wilson books: I think it's as good as The Chronoliths, while I would rate Darwinia as a 7/10.

    <cite>Darwinia<cite>

    should be changed to:

    <cite>Darwinia</cite>

    Specifically the cite tag needs to be closed properly. The way the article is now, all of the text after the article (including the comments) is italicized.

  • I'm 2/3s of the way through Macroscope right now, and this sounds kind of similar...
  • I always look at the book review forums as a good place to pick up on authors I haven't read yet (other than the one actually reviewed), so I usually post this thread to get things started. Please feel free to add onto it; this is what I'd recommend reading right now.

    On reflection, I've spent most of the summer reading nonfiction for a change...

    Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
    Swofford was a Marine sniper during Gulf War I, and this book talks about that experience and his experience in the Corps. It's an e

  • Implement a kind of .plan file for Dashboard for users who desire it. In this (preferrably XML-based) file, it contains a reading list for the user (and even a music list). More interesting (seeings how the Amazon.com stuff is already in the code) would be to link those book selections to Amazon for some good 1-click shopping. Add in a referral reference (maybe have a standard one for the GNOME foundation?) and it could make for a small revenue stream for the developers, although it would make sense to 1

  • NOT a "minor issue". (Score:2, Informative)

    by Wolfkin ( 17910 )
    Wilson's stuff consistently fails to deliver on the promise of the first 1/3 of the book. I've been suckered twice by him, once for "Harvest" and once for "Cronoliths".

    Wilson's books seem to focus on the main characters' ordinary lives, even in the face of something really interesting happening, *somewhere else*. You keep hoping that we'll get to see the interesting things, but that never happens.
  • I kind of like my science fiction with a high threshold on geek plots, and a low threshold on substance...but that's just me. If I wanted substance, I'd read a non-scifi book. Still, I can see how people would be interested in it.

    More Information [66.199.135.127]

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