Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson

[lightreads]

Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In future America, a scientific installation observes life on a very distant planet through complicated quantum whatsits, trying to make sense of behavior with no commonality or context. But then the facility is locked down from the outside with no communication or explanation, leaving an astrobiologist, her troubled daughter and crazy ex-husband, and a reporter inside.

All right, now there's a book. A three-star Wilson book is a four-star for most other scifi authors. This isn't the best of him – it has some timing problems, and he shorthands some of the emotional depth. But there's such thematic richness here: it's a book about transitioning from objective observationalism to subjective narratives. It's about Heisenberg uncertainty and observer effects and subject/object positioning. And it's all tense and clever and mysterious, right up to the very end.

Not the best of Wilson, like I said. He handicaps himself a bit by closing the universe of the book down to the facility, because one thing he's very good at is depicting global crisis in meaningful and personal ways (see Spin, which I still really, really like). And this book doesn't quite juggle the interpersonal intensity against the nifty science with the grace he does later. But it's still a damn good book.

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