6) Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson

I managed to finish three books on my recent trip and will probably finish a fourth on the last of my six flights at lunchtime today, so will be posting a few more book updates over the weekend. Blind Lake is the penultimate of the Hugo nominees that I have read – and that now includes all the short fiction, which I managed to print out and take with me. I’ll do a page for my website with reviews of them all once I can bring myself to finish Humans.

I liked almost all of Blind Lake. It’s about a community of research scientists in the very near future who have been able (for reasons they don’t fully understand) to observe remotely a community of aliens on a planet far far away. Their research facility is suddenly isolated from the outside world, with no communication possible, and the human relationships between the researchers churn out of control. I thought it was much more successful in this regard than Chronoliths, by the same author, nominated last year. However, as with Chronoliths, I felt the ending was a bit weak and left too little explained. Kubrick barely gets away with it in 2001: A Space Odyssey and I’ve never read a book that managed the trick of leaving you with the sensawunda without explaining What Was really Going On.