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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.
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.
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 ?
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
...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.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
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
I hope /. is getting some money for this kind of thing even if a real person is posting it. But it sure makes me wonder if Amazon has some kind of bot that watches for book reviews and posts the 'save money' thing as an AC.
Note to moderators -- pleez do not moderate this kind of thing up. We are all smart enough to shop around if we want to save money and it just encourages them...
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
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.
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.