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Blind Lake
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
- Author's homepage
- Interesting reviews of Wilson's books
- The Blind Lake page at Barnes&Noble has interesting other comments (maybe even already a bit too much info if you haven't read the book yet).
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.
Another fairly recent sci-fi book that tackles the problems in interpreting alien behavior is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. 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.
Sailing over the event horizon
FYI, the above link gives money to the linker.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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.
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, 52 the year beyond, etc.
Now, from any point on the surface of this 100-lightyear-diamater sphere, how many individual photons from the original event will be visible?
Without even bothering to do a back-of-the-napkin calculation, I think we can assume it's so few that the event itself is simply not witnessable at that distance.
Data about the event, however, if properly encoded and broadcast at the right frequencies with enough power (i.e., more photons), would still be decodable.
Sorry if this is really simplistic, perhaps someone who actually majored in physics can explain it better (it's just a hobby for me, and I read far too much Scientific American).
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
The Victorian Era did *NOT* product the slowest novels of all time.
Sincerely,
Marcel Proust
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...
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.
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.