Blind Lake

Rating:
Summary: Ethnographic Science Fiction...
Review: For my money, Robert Charles Wilson has written some of the most thought-out science fiction in the market today. He is exceedingly good at taking a central idea, drawing you in, and then pulling the lens back to a much wider perspective that shows things being completely different than you'd expected - but that somehow manage to be logically consistent and equally as fascinating. Even with that high standard, "Blind Lake" not only lives up to that ideal, but is possibly his best work to date.

The book deals with many themes that are familiar to readers of his other books. Not just wildly different perspectives of a given story or concept, but also the ideas of divorce, gender, loss, being cut off from the outside world, and knowing that something just isn't right, but not knowing how to fix it. These are all mixed together masterfully in a story of a mid-to-late 21st Century research complex of scientists whose complex is suddenly completely quarantined from the outside world for reasons that undoubtedly involve them, but seem to be completely unapparent. While slowly ratcheting up the tension level throughout the story, he creates an amazing page-turning tension that had me up until 3:30 am working my way through it.

Beyond that, though, the story also deals with how we would try to understand aliens on their own terms if we could view them without having contact with them. What types of classifications would we use? What types of stories would we tell ourselves - or not allow ourselves to tell ourselves - about these beings? As an anthropology student, I find these questions every bit as fascinating from an anthropological perspective as from a scientific perspective. In fact, I'd even recommend this book to anthropologists as a study in how to perceive a people you share virtually no common link with.

Beyond all of that, though, this book is a great read. If you've liked Wilson's other books, I can't imagine this one disappointing, and if you haven't, this is as good a place to start as any of his other books. They're all stand-alone anyway. I very much hope to see this book nominated for the Hugo Award in 2004...

Rating:
Summary: A surprisingly weak novel from a talented writer
Review: Robert Charles Wilson has written some of the best mainstream sf of the past ten or fifteen years. His last book before this one had been The Chronoliths, a riveting dystopian novel that married personal and global tragedy, and I had high expectations for Blind Lake. Sadly, he failed to live up to those expectations; while his broad conception of the novel, an sf thriller that also examines imagination and story-telling, was sound, it's undermined by lackluster execution.

The biggest flaw lies with the characters, which are frequently ignored in the cause of Wilson's big ideas; like many sf novels, it sometimes feels as if the characters are just saying the things the author wants them to say, rather than the things they would naturally say. Their personal struggles, rather than being linked with the larger story as in The Chronoliths, feel arbitrary and distracting from the cosmological heart of the novel; moments that should resonate end up irritating instead.

The prose isn't exactly inspiring either. For a veteran sf writer, Wilson has a surprisingly clunky and graceless way of handling exposition, falling into that old trap of the infodump. This is true even at the climax of the novel, where Wilson suddenly decides to humanize the villain in a way that simply doesn't work; I can't imagine how it could have felt more tacked on. Some moments (Subject's story, for one) work like gangbusters, but most don't.

The big themes of the novel are also over-emphasized; the refrain, "It could end at any moment" is repeated ad nauseam, when Wilson could have gotten the same effect in a more graceful way. In fact, what the novel needs in general is a little grace and subtlety, allowing the big picture to emerge from the give and take of natural character interaction; sadly, what could have been a moving and involving tale is instead a routine sf thriller. It's exciting enough, but nothing like what Robert Charles Wilson is capable of.

Rating:
Summary: Science fiction that is always believable
Review: Robert Charles Wilson is one of my favorite SF writers by far. He doesn't write far-out space operas (which I happen to love, e.g. Vinge, Bear, Brin, Simmons, etc.), but rather "down-home" SF which is always on the edge of the possible, meaning, you think these things just might happen some day. I think of Wilson as a philosopher who happens to write SF. There is depth and lots of feeling; whenever I finish one of his books, I feel fully rewarded. This is what a reviewer in the Daedalus Books catalog said about a collection of his short stories: "This collection showcases Robert Charles Wilson's suppleness and strength: bravura ideas, scientific rigor, and three-dimensional human beings facing hard choices." Several interesting and viable themes are interwoven in 'Blind Lake', and as usual the #1 thing I love in Wilson's books, a great fullness and depth of FEELING. And if you're interested in the burgeoning topic of Quantum Computation, as I am ('The Fabric of Reality' by David Deutsch is a popular-level masterpiece on this topic), then Blind Lake is a book to read, and I think events similar to those in this book could easily take place within another 20 years.

Rating:
Summary: Great characters, great plot, lousy ending
Review: With a Hugo nomination and a glowing review from my favorite Sf author, Rob Sawyer, to recommend it, this book looked like a sure-fire winner. I was quickly caught up in the characters and the plot, and I didn't want to put the book down! I wish I had. After about 350 pages of pure enjoyment, the book's ending is a Grade B filmmaker's delight that is not only farfetched but inconclusive, resolving the character issues but leaving the central SF question unclear.
Wilson is a very talented writer, but he does not seem to be able to handle endings satisfactorily, as both this book and Chronoliths exemplify. If he could correct this weakness, Wilson could quickly become someone to buy in hardback!
If you want to read some great Hugo-nominated SF by a Canadian writer, give this one a miss and pick up Sawyer's own Hominids, which won last year's Hugo, or its sequel, Humans, which is nominated this year.