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Dark Orbit A Novel Carolyn Ives Gilman Books

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Dark Orbit A Novel Carolyn Ives Gilman Books

This fascinating novel can be read on many levels. It is a story of the exploration of a hitherto unknown world. It is an intriguing mystery in which a murder occurs on the spaceship of the explorers and must have been committed by someone on the ship—but who? No one is above suspicion, including the chief security officer who is in charge of the investigation. The novel is also a psychological study of the female protagonist and the woman she has been assigned to “keep an eye on.” It is a novel of discovery. The explorers encounter, on what they believed to be an uninhabited planet, a small colony of people living in utter darkness in a cavern too far below the planet’s surface to have been detected by the explorers’ probes. This group of people, because they live in a place without light, have eyes but have never learned to see. Knowing nothing about sight, they have no sense of lacking it. It is captivating to discover how they designed their village and find their way around in it. The contrast between sight and blindness, light and darkness pervades the novel on many levels. And can quantum physics explain a strange ability on the part of this community of the blind? This science fiction novel combines advanced science with mysticism in a totally believable way and leaves the reader with much food for thought.


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Dark Orbit A Novel Carolyn Ives Gilman Books Reviews

Dark Orbit is set in a distant future with mankind re-exploring the galaxy ages after the collapse of an earlier starfaring civilization of humans. No alien life has been found, but colonies from the earlier diaspora are routinely uncovered. Cut off for ages, they've often forgotten their origins and have developed very alien cultures. The story concerns the discovery of one group living in a subterranean colony in a star system wracked by spacial anomolies. These humans have lived in complete darkness for so long they’ve stopped using their eyes. Reliance on other senses has produced an acute awareness of things not readily perceptible to average humans and the instability of local space has enabled them at act on it in an incredible way.

The story is mostly a mystery. There are hidden agendas on the exploration team and a murder early on puts everyone on edge. To tell more would get spoilerish. The mystery is entertaining but the real meat of the book is how it leads the reader to examine things from different perspectives. The author is a Smithsonian scientist who specializes in cultural archeology and you can see her experience at work as we look through the varied lenses of the multicultural research team and the colonists. She excels at challenging presuppositions. But while the cultural stuff is fun, what makes the book exceptional is its speculation on the nature of the universe.

I’m really glad I found this book and look forward to reading others by Margaret Ives-Gilman.
This is a thoughtful, multilayered modern sci-fi tale. It has a human and spiritual side which is often lacking in techno-sci fi, although it’s not as deep as you might get from, say, Ursula LeGuin. There are some intriguing concepts, and the characters are not all what they may seem. Drawbacks are that, apart from The handful of main characters, the supporting characters are underdeveloped and underused, such that I forgot who was who. There are also some subplots set up early on that don’t have much of a payoff. Overall pretty well written and enjoyable and I will add this author to my list for future reading.
As I started reading this novel, it sounded so promising I was hooked. Humans sent expeditions to colonize planets a long time ago, and lost track of them (the reason isn't explained in the book). Now automated vessels are scouting the galaxy in search of these lost colonies, or of new habitable planets. When they find something, people are teleported aboard at the speed of light to investigate and study. These people have to deal with all the drawbacks of travelling for decades between planets, including the loss of those they knew, the need to adapt to the societal changes that happened in their absence, etc. In this case, people are sent to a planet with anomalous gravity phenomena (the book threw in dark matter as explanation, I don't think it was needed). In this planetary system, gravity is as capricious as weather, space and time geometry are rearranged in sometimes beautiful ways (there's something like a multidimensional forest that sounds quite fascinating). Unfortunately things go downhill from here. Science is happily abandoned in favor of divine possession (I wish I was joking), astral projections (or something like it) and some really preposterous version of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
This fascinating novel can be read on many levels. It is a story of the exploration of a hitherto unknown world. It is an intriguing mystery in which a murder occurs on the spaceship of the explorers and must have been committed by someone on the ship—but who? No one is above suspicion, including the chief security officer who is in charge of the investigation. The novel is also a psychological study of the female protagonist and the woman she has been assigned to “keep an eye on.” It is a novel of discovery. The explorers encounter, on what they believed to be an uninhabited planet, a small colony of people living in utter darkness in a cavern too far below the planet’s surface to have been detected by the explorers’ probes. This group of people, because they live in a place without light, have eyes but have never learned to see. Knowing nothing about sight, they have no sense of lacking it. It is captivating to discover how they designed their village and find their way around in it. The contrast between sight and blindness, light and darkness pervades the novel on many levels. And can quantum physics explain a strange ability on the part of this community of the blind? This science fiction novel combines advanced science with mysticism in a totally believable way and leaves the reader with much food for thought.