Reviews for Blind Lake

The average rating for Blind Lake based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-04-12 00:00:00 Amy Fruth I started reading this book thinking that it would be entertaining and a light read. I had liked Robert Charles Wilson's "Chronoliths" and I thought "Spin" was extremely good. So, when I got an Amazon.com recommendation for "Blind Lake," I thought it sounded interesting enough to order. I expected it would be a three or four star book; it turned out to be amazing. The science part is good, but it's not the be-all and end-all of the book. Wilson does an amazing job of developing his characters. And, the ending is just phenomenal. Wilson takes the incredible and makes it believable. Where "Spin" is a novel about the Earth being cut off from the universe and what that isolation does to humanity, "Blind Lake" is about a community being cut off from the rest of Earth and what that does to the people who are trapped there. The town of Blind Lake is home to a government research facility observing alien life on a planet far, far away. The technology used in this research is so new that even its developers don't understand how it works. As the novel progresses, we begin to guess how it's working, but we never get the full picture until the end. One day, the gates to the community are locked. Robotic drones kill anyone who tries to get outside the perimeter. Food and supplies are brought in by remote-controlled big rigs. There is no explanation and no contact with the outside world. Every action of every character is believable. The way Wilson gets inside the heads of control-freak Ray Scutter and his mildly autistic (maybe) 11 year-old daughter, Tessa Hauser, is especially good. Tessa is a very realistic child. She isn't mature beyond her years like so many children in science fiction novels. In fact, she is slightly less mature than most children her age. Although she's been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, Wilson doesn't use that as a platform to teach us about autism. Instead, it's just a small part of who Tessa is and it may be a part of the reason why she becomes so central to the climax of the novel. He treats her with the utmost respect and her attitudes and fears are completely authentic. I found myself identifying with her more than any other character. She reminded me a bit of myself as a child; a stranger looking in. Ray Scutter is probably one of the creepiest characters I've met in any kind of fiction. He's every divorced mother's worst nightmare of an ex-husband. He's a stalker. He refuses to relinquish ownership of his ex-wife or his daughter. He got a position at the Blind Lake facility and arranged it so he got there a few months before his ex-wife did so it would look like she was following him. He can't even refer to her as his ex-wife; he calls her his wife. He's a control freak and doesn't handle contradictions to his world view very well. The longer the unexplained quarantine of Blind Lake goes on, the less of a hold on sanity Ray has. The more he tries to regain control, the more unstable he becomes. He ends up being every bit as frightening as any character I've met. Yet, he's also pathetic. Wilson makes it clear that Ray is what he is because he's really messed up. We fear him and hate him, but we also pity him. I didn't expect to be reading a five-star book, but that's what I got.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-04-16 00:00:00 Jeffrey Walker This is an odd but oddly likeable book. I read it in one sitting... so it was clearly engrossing, but engrossing in a sort of detached way. I think that Robert Charles Wilson is one of those writers who becomes, at least for a while, the principal character(s) he writes about, and the principal characters (Tess, Marguerite, Chris, the Subject) in Blind Lake are all emotionally disconnected from the world about them. As a result, Wilson seems to have written the book as one of his characters would have written it... in a slightly distanced style. It is not a great book, but I think that it has no aspirations to be so -- this is a piece of chamber music rather than a symphony. It is, however, a very good book, imaginative, reasonably well plotted, with interesting characters and interpersonal dynamics, thought-provoking, and (best of all) creating moments of wonder. It was let down in several small ways by its editor (how can the back-of-the-book blurb use different names from those in the book?), but that is nitpicking. Overall I liked Blind Lake quite a bit (I'm English by birth, so be alert for understatement), am glad to have read it, and will read other books by Wilson. That's worth four stars in my library.