At the end of my review for Brightness Reef, I wrote that I was excited to read Infinity’s Shore. I immediately opened up Infinity’s Shore, and found myself annoyed. There is no blatant intro info dump here, which is a good, but Brin keeps covering the same explanatory territory in ways that annoy. How many times does he have to explain what Biblos is, what “the peace” is, that this character’s body is hydrophobic, that Herbie is mysterious. Come on, we get it. Perhaps he is responding to criticism that the myriad races were difficult to tell apart in the last novel, but these three novels were written as one, according to Brin. So, by seven-eighths of the way through this second one, I shouldn’t still be hearing, “Gillian misses Tom”, and watching the author again drop that thread right there, as if Brin is introducing me to this for the first time, again. He recaps his own recaps.
Humans wrestled endlessly with their own overpowering egos. Some tried suppressing selfness, seeking detachment. Others subsumed personal ambition in favor of a greater whole—family, religion, or a leader. Later they passed through a phase in which individualism was extolled as the highest virtue, teaching their young to inflate the ego beyond all natural limits or restraint.
But it raises a more interesting question: how much of the sequel should be spent covering aspects of past books, ensuring readers do not miss connections? Too much seems insulting. Not enough seems frustrating to comprehension. So much of speculative fiction explores multi-book themes and stories. This recap question should be forefront on many writers’ minds. According to Brin, this is the first time that he has done a sequel, so I hope he gets better at it in the future. I do not have an answer to that question of sequels as standalones, and it's probably a case by case basis, but it surprises me that it arises here.
Yet egotism can also be useful to ambitious creatures, driving their single-minded pursuit of success. Madness seems essential in order to be “great.”
Brin is typically sparse with his information. It’s one of the things that makes his worldbuilding spectacular: historical events in-universe are hinted at, but not explained.
—For instance, whatever happened in that Shallow Cluster where the dolphin ship found Herbie is never fully explained. Instead, Brin gives a sentence here or there discussing aspects of what happened. But he never goes full info-dump and gives out the whole story via reminiscence or dream. This leaves the reader with concrete facts, but an incomplete picture. Delicious.
—Another example is that of transcendence. This has been hinted at through the other four books in the Uplift series, but Brin explains more each time he touches on it here. It’s like the reader is right there with the characters, understanding more as they understand more.
—This tendency to hint but not explain past events and galactic context shows that there is depth here, but Brin knows better than to focus on that depth because the focus of his story is elsewhere. It’s a fantastic tactic, and one that clashes with his recapping his own recaps.
The theme here is what makes us ourselves. Lark never wanted to leave Jijo, but now he is off-planet and is he still Lark? Emerson is back among his friends, but he has no capacity with words, so the two people he used to be—an engineer onboard the dolphin ship and a mysterious, almost mute stranger—do not apply to this new situation and he is again trying to find where he fits in, who he is. Dwer is stuck with Rety on a spaceship escaping Jijo, yet he is a part of Jijo’s ecosystem in such a fundamental way that he is at a loss to even know what his options are in this new place. Who are we, how do we know that, and why does that change? These are the questions Brin approaches with this novel. It’s nice to see the Uplift universe being used for more than a discussion of diversity, though diversity still plays a big role in this novel.
The story is satisfyingly complex and there is a ton going on. The writing is great: the aliens feel alien in the way they talk. Each character is distinctive. But, being the second of three novels, much is left in the air at the end, leaving it with weak legs to stand on as its own book. So, again, this is a book I devoured as a reader, though I was regularly annoyed with how much repetitive recapping occurred. It left me again hungry to read the next novel in the series.
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