Adam Roberts, "Lake of Darkness"

Adam Roberts was born in 1965 in London. He studied English and Classics at Aberdeen University, did a PhD at Cambridge and is now Professor of 19th Century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published 26 novels, all (except one) science fiction, and intends to continue doing so. His latest novel is Lake of Darkness (Gollancz 2024).

 

About Lake of Darkness, by Adam Roberts
An expedition to explore a black hole discovers, or seems to, that some being or beings are living inside the event horizon. A crewmember, Raine, claims he has been contacted by a being he calls "The Gentleman," goes murderously mad, and kills all his crewmates. Evil passes like a contagion through the utopian societies of the far future. A second expedition is mounted and returns to the black hole. Its lead scientist, Guunarsonsdottir, is convinced an alien species has evolved inside the exacting conditions of the black hole, and that communications can be opened across the event horizon. Joyns, a mission specialist, comes to fear that something malevolent, an ancient evil, is inside the black hole, wanting to escape. The mood aboard the ship deteriorates, and the crew split into two factions, fighting amongst themselves. Joyns is confined to quarters.

You can read more about Lake of Darkness on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

 

From Lake of Darkness
But she couldn’t sleep. She turned from her left to her right side and then again to her left, feeling the slight difference when she turned with the direction of spin as opposed to against it. She instructed the room to turn out all lights but then felt abandoned and scared in the dark, and so ordered the lights back on, to shine a low yellow-orange glow. She lay on her back. She tried to compose her mind into a meditative state, but it wouldn’t settle. She got up and knelt and prayed, but it was a vacancy, a mere going through the motions, and she soon stopped.

It was impossible to sleep.

At one point she heard two people outside her room. Given the great size of the startship and the relatively small number of crew, this was odd. Joyns sat up, believing they had specifically come to speak with her, and wondering why they hadn’t simply called her. But they hadn’t come to her.

There were two of them, one who sounded a little like Samuel, the other whose voice she didn’t recognise. That struck Joyns as odd, because she thought Guunarsonsdottir had barricaded herself and her followers in a separate part of the ship. But there they were, outside her room. Or their voices at any rate. Perhaps the barricade had been breached and Guunarsonsdottir’s followers were on the run. Perhaps they themselves were staging a raid behind enemy lines. The two of them were talking loudly about the best way of incapacitating Saccade—which must mean not only that Saccade had arrived, but the news of her advent must have reached Guunarsonsdottir’s portion of the ship as well. One of the two, perhaps Samuel said, distinctly, "kill her, it’s the only way" and the other person, Joyns didn’t recognise their voice, said: "she’s really here! really! she’s here!" and then laughed like a cat miaowing, then their voices dropped and Joyns couldn’t follow them. There followed a strange melange of sounds, scrapings and gruntings and smacking sounds, and it took Joyns a moment to piece together than the two figures were grappling and fighting one another.

Then there was a loud slapping sound, and the sound of somebody running away, their footsteps slightly syncopated by the fact that one foot was placed more spinwise than the other.

Had both parties run away? Was one lying wounded or dead outside her door?

Joyns contemplated getting up and checking, but a deep resistance to the idea occupied her limbs. She sat up and checked the ship’s time. One minute to midnight—the startship’s arbitrary midnight, by which the arbitrary business of timekeeping was calibrated, as it was on a million ships and habitats around the inhabited galaxy. I should get up, she told herself. But she did not.

It was dead midnight and the lights in her room glowed blue.

She hadn’t told the room to change the colour, and it was a chilly, morbid shade of blue that was accompanied by a distinct drop in temperature. She hadn’t ordered that either! It certainly wasn’t going to help her get to sleep, so she said "Room!" preparatory to ordering it to restore the earlier light and heat settings when she saw she was not alone.

She saw at once who it was: the Gentleman. He was dressed in a mauve jacket and trousers, the jacket sharply cut and folded over a harlequin-green shirt and necktie, after the manner and style of an actor in an historical drama. He carried a walking stick shaped like the Hebrew letter vav. His face was lean and sharp-featured. Joyns was not a fan of antique painted art and so was unaware of the old Vannick painting The Arnolfini Betrothal, but had she ever seen that image she would have recognised the face of the man in her visitor (though not the lavish Flemish cloak; the Gentleman wore nothing so voluminous). And here he was, as—Joyns assumed—he had appeared to Raine, years before. He was seated in a chair that had not been there before, surveying Joyns with prominently-lidded eyes.

"Good grief," said Joyns.

"Half right," said the Gentleman.

"You’re not here," Joyns said. She drew herself back along the floor, and rested her spine against the wall of her room. If she sprinted she would surely reach the door before the Gentleman could stop her. Indeed, it looked, from his demeanour and his posture, as if any decision on his part to rise from his seat would be a leisurely and unhurried business. But then she thought: he appeared instantly from nowhere. She thought: if I rush the door he’ll be there in the way before I move an inch. Then she reassured herself: he was a vision, a hallucination, and certainly not real. "You," she reiterated, "are not here."

"Here," he said looking around, "is a more complicated concept than perhaps you give it credit." 

Adam Roberts, "The This"

 

Adam Roberts is the author of 24 science fiction novels, and many non-fiction and academic works, including a History of Science Fiction (2nd ed, Palgrave 2016). He is professor of nineteenth-century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives a little way west of London. He blogs here. He also blogs here, and here. He probably has too many blogs, to be honest.

About The This, by Adam Roberts

The This is a pulp-science fiction novelisation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. The title refers to a corporation who market a device that, once it is inserted into the roof of your mouth and when it has embedded its tendrils in your brain, allows you to go online, post to social media and so on simply by thinking it; either a simple device to make your life easier, or perhaps a malign plot to recruit you to a hive-mind consciousness. But, really, the novel is  pulp-science fiction novelisation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.  

You can read more about The This on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From The This

It was a sunny day. A marine-coloured sky. A scattering of bright white clouds were stretching their irregular-shaped wings. Birds circled. Rich paused on his building’s doorstep to put on sunglasses, and then navigated the mob of bins, gathered like ravers in the tiny front yard, mouths open at the gobsmacking splendour of the day. Then onto the pavement, turn left and along to the main road. He got his phone out and checked his feeds.

A wait at the junction, where the south circular traffic buzzed and fizzed its electric way westward and eastward. Rich on his phone, just like every other pedestrian, crowds at each of the four corners of this cross-hatched yellow box. All this infrastructure, set up in the last century to service that small fraction of the population who are actually blind had found new purpose in this century servicing the physically-sighted but functionally-blind populations walking about with their gazes kidnapped by their phones.

Bip-bip-bip-bip, and Rich stretched his legs and strode across.

Past the station and down the hill, swerving as and when another sightless pedestrian approached in the opposite direction with that fifth sense modern humanity has developed since the invention of these screens, these ubiquitous screens, these unignorable screens. An electronic patter of unignorable status updates, and he couldn’t look away. The map-app pinged him to turn left. He was at the river. Putney bridge, which is of stone, wearing its row of Victorian-style lampposts like eyelashes. And there was the Thames, still not weary after forty thousand years of scouring its gravel bed and pouring itself into the sea. The air smelt of silt and brine and vaguely of something tartly chemical, which fact barely registered on Rich’s sensorium. Rich didn’t look at the river. It’s not as though he’d never seen it before, after all. Eyes on his phone he trotted down Lower Richmond Road and stopped when his map-app sounded its little alarm.

He was there.

There is a word that always describes where we are, of course.

Rich finally disengaged his eyes from his phone. The Putney offices of The This were a new-build seven-storey weave of glass, helixing whitestone pillars and steel. It looked expensive which, Rich assumed, was the point. He walked up the ramp. Doors swished away before him and reconnected behind him and he was in a marble hallway.

‘Hello?’ he said to the receptionist. A real live human, paid to sit behind a counter all day. Rich moved closer, smacking the marble as he walked as if his own feet were slow-clapping him. ‘I’m Rich Rigby. Differencework have set-up a quick interview with,’ he checked his phone, ‘Aella Hamilton?’