Adam Roberts is fucking awesome. It took me too long to realise this. I snubbed his work for years, thinking it wouldn’t be my thing. (I’m now convinced that it’s not until you reach forty that your tastes fully mature). Then I picked up Bête, the one where animals start begging for their lives, and I realised that Roberts was a dead-set genius. The novel that followed Bête, The Thing Itself, only reinforced this. A book worthy of all the fucking awards.*

I’ve recently been watching TikTok videos by a creator called Dr Blitz. He’s a quantum mathematician who has an interest in black holes. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the videos—all that talk about gravity and Hawking Radiation and density—but they primed me for Lake of Darkness, which centres on a black hole that may or may not be the home of a malevolent entity. The novel’s opening section sees Alpha Raine, the Captain of one of two Startships (not Starships), orbiting a black hole, kill his crew and the other ship’s crew in the goriest and cruellest of fashions. All the while, he believes he’s under the thumb of Mr. Modo, the entity communicating with him from within the black hole. 

Because this is an Adam Roberts’s novel, the “Event Horizon” conceit isn’t an end in itself but the trigger for a fascinating philosophical conversation about evil and utopia. We learn that humanity, in all its diversity and belief systems, is spread across the galaxy, living lives of abundance and indulgence, where any desire, physical or intellectual, can be satiated. Alpha Raine’s murder spree is a shocking incursion on that society, ill-equipped to deal with the concept of wickedness. There’s also some very clever, mind-bending stuff about the nature of black holes, especially the information paradox (which was apparently solved in 2023, but don’t quote me).

Like all of Roberts’s work—particularly The Thing Itself and The This, in which Lake of Darkness is the third in a conceptual trilogy—the book is fizzing with theoretical, metaphysical and theological ideas. The characters might be a little thinner than what I’m used to from Roberts, but even here, that can be excused given one of the points of the novel is that a society devoid of conflict and entirely reliant on AI—to the extent that people no longer see the need to learn how to read—will drain you of personality. But if the characters lack sharp edges, this is made up for by a clutch of tremendous set-pieces (one involving a journey to the core of a planet) and the introduction of the sauve and decidedly slimy Mr Modo, also known as The Gentleman, but definitely not The Devil.**

If this were a longer review, I’d go on endlessly about Robert’s deep dive into theology and how he’s one of the few genre writers to unashamedly discuss and meditate on faith and spirituality—though not necessarily as an antidote to nihilism. Instead, I will say that Adam Roberts is under-appreciated, which, in one sense, is a depressing way to end a review. In another sense, it is a call to action to all you discerning, intelligent readers who sometimes bemoan the samey-sameness of genre fiction. Read Adam “Awesome-Sauce” Roberts.

*Which it didn’t get and which remains a fucking crime. (It wasn’t even nominated for the Clarke).

**He’s The Devil.