Topological Black Holes -- Outside Looking In

I describe the general mathematical construction and physical picture of topological black holes, which are black holes whose event horizons are surfaces of non-trivial topology. The construction is carried out in an arbitrary number of dimensions, and includes all known special cases which have appeared before in the literature. I describe the basic features of massive charged topological black holes in (3 + 1) dimensions, from both an exterior and interior point of view. To investigate their interiors, it is necessary to understand the radiative falloff behaviour of a given massless field at late times in the background of a topological black hole. I describe the results of a numerical investigation of such behaviour for a conformally coupled scalar field. Significant differences emerge between spherical and higher genus topologies. 1 Introduction It has become clear over the last decade that black holes have an essential role to play in the development of a quantum theory of grav..