topological theology

Adam Roberts is a metaphysical novelist, in two senses of the word. First, like the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, he delights in fabulous conceits, extreme metaphors, analogies pushed to and beyond their apparent limits — “knight’s moves,” he calls them.

But Adam is also a novelist who engages metaphysics: the metaphysics of Kant in The Thing Itself (the title tells you what the dominant concept is), that of Hegel in The This (Absolute Spirit, or the Absolute — or Abby) and now that of Gilles Deleuze (the “fold,” most obviously, though perhaps the structurally related concept of the plane of immanence is equally important).

Consider this: What is the relationship between a black hole and ordinary space? We imagine something, anything drawing closer to the black hole, closer and closer, still in ordinary space, and then it crosses the event horizon, from which it cannot return. We conceive of that something, anything as being outside the black hole but then, having crossed the event horizon, being inside it.

But what if space is folded, and folded in such a way that inside and outside are not stable, perhaps not even relevant, concepts? Or, to put the question a different way, what if space is a Klein bottle?

(Take a look, when you have time, at this lovely collection of Klein bottles at London’s Science Museum.)

A Klein bottle doesn’t have an inside, and because it doesn’t have an inside it doesn’t have an outside either. It cannot be described in those terms. Well, what if the universe is like that?

And what if there is a God?

And what if there is a Satan, the Adversary of God?

And what if God flings Satan into a black-hole oubliette we might call Hell?

And what if the event horizon of the black hole is a doorway?

If we are on one side of the event horizon and Satan is on the other side, are we outside and he inside? Or vice versa? Or, if the universe is a Klein bottle, must we abandon those modes of description altogether and think instead of the topology of Creation, the ways in which Creation is folded, deformed, twisted, bent — but does not have an inside or an outside?

Think on these questions, try to come up with answers to them, and then ask one more: Where is Satan?

You are now ready to read Lake of Darkness. Don’t worry: after all, facilis descensus Averno.

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Okay. Adam Roberts, then, is a metaphysical novelist, but he is also an acute social observer, and the novel raises non-metaphysical questions as well. As I was reading Lake of Darkness, at a certain moment I began to realize that its characters, human beings from the far future, aren’t very smart. Or perhaps I should say that they know very little. One clue: they are familiar with many things from our time, they know of the book Alas in Wonderland, they sing our songs, like “We all live in a yellow sunny scene” and “Hail the Conquer-King Hero Comes.” Why do they get these things slightly wrong? Because they’re illiterate. Very few of them can read or write. Why are they illiterate? Because when they want to know something they just ask an A.I. and the A.I. tells them.

Artificial Intelligence has built for them utopias to live in (many different ones, because after all one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia) — but, and one key character comes at least partially to understand this, these places are really “infantopias.” Playgrounds for children. The humans of this far future are intellectually what the humans in Wall•E are physically: coddled into placid uselessness.

Now here comes someone, a man. He carries a walking stick that looks a bit like this:

On the heavy lids of his eyes you can see prominent folds. He says something along these lines: “Please allow me to introduce myself; I’m a man of wealth and taste. And I hate to see human beings reduced to this soporific condition, this infantile paralysis of the mind and spirit. You’ve sat back and allowed your machines to make the crooked places straight and the rough places smooth. With my help, you can reclaim your independence, you can free your mind, you can be once again what you were … made to be. You just need to give me the chance to set things in motion. Oh, it’ll hurt, to be sure; but it’s true what they say: No pain, no gain. And once you taste freedom, trust me: you’ll be hooked.”

The gentleman has a point, doesn’t he?

Doesn’t he?