Infinity's Shore by David Brin

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.

Brightness Reef by David Brin

David Brin intentionally includes inconsistencies within his characters’ logic in a way that seems to reflect real life. For instance, when discussing where sapient species come from, the galactic community says that self-uplift is impossible. Galactics don’t believe in evolution: no species has gone from single cell to complex, meta-cognitive creature on their own. But—and here’s the key to Brin making this feel like the world reflects reality—that fabled, probably first race that did so much to uplift so many, the Progenitors, may have. This is what I mean by inconsistent logic; these hereditary, patron-client obsessive people believe two different things about the same process depending on their own perception of the time frame involved. Through knowing hypocrisy, thoughtlessness, willful ignorance, lack of examination, or accident, people don’t always follow what they think they believe. Neither do Brin’s characters. And this is one of the main things that makes Brin’s world, Jijo and the Five Galaxies, so convincing. This one move right here helps Brin build a believable world, and helps sew the seeds for mystery and lack of certainty that drive the story onwards.

Creative people see Prometheus in a mirror, never Pandora.

And this example isn’t the only one Brin uses of intentional inconsistencies: humans are progress oriented, trying to leave their children better off than they were, but on Jijo they are trying to downlift themselves through attaining ignorance and reversing their evolutionary track. These two competing drives, this inconsistency, deeply informs Sara’s character. I feel like a lot of people care a lot about consistency in their written works, and it’s refreshing to see Brin reflect reality by intentionally including inconsistencies in his work. It’s something I need to think about more in my own writing. It seems particularly appropriate to larger works.

It was a strange trek — the sullen leading the apathetic, followed by the confused, all tailed by the inveterately amused.

The writing here is quite good. The descriptions are engaging and informative. He has come so far from Sundiver, and he is getting better as a writer. I appreciate seeing an author improve. His best work here is in world building, and character development through making each talk in unique ways. This is a complex world with six species and multiple representative characters from each species. Though at times I get a little lost which of the Six species certain characters represent, I tend to think maybe my inconsistent reading schedule is more to blame than Brin’s writing. This over complexity is partially solved by a drawing included in the book, showing the six races: the drawing helps keep them straight. But they are so interconnected that they each borrow verbal and physical communication skills from each other, further confusing my reading. The need for the drawing seems like it may be a weakness, but I’m not sure it wasn’t just me reading this book in too many starts and stops. Well, the chapters are often short, starting and stopping often after a couple of pages, encouraging my reading pace.

Magic and art arise from an egomaniac's insistence that the artist is right, and the universe wrong.

The themes clearly deal with diversity, while showing positives—creativity, self-identification, and variety of interpretations of events—while also showing some of the negatives—stubbornness, forgetfullness, the ease of schisms developing along species lines, and the variety of a single event’s threat level on differing species. This is one of Brin’s main themes that is consistent across all of the Uplift books so far, having now read the first four. He also focuses here on evolution/devolution, especially relating it to technology and language. And his main idea here is summed up by saying that perhaps language devolution is a sign of progress, allowing more subtle things to be communicated more easily compared to the more rigid Indo-European. Even this interesting observation is tied into the idea that diversity increases complexity, which is often a benefit.

How strange. Humans always seem so much in control. Is it just a grand act, to fool both others and themselves?

This novel is one of the best Brin books I’ve read. To be as clear as possible, this is a great novel. It’s only hampered by being part one of three—at the end, too much is left in the air for this to be a great novel in its own right. But while reading it, I loved it. This book coalesces to sensational storytelling, great writing, a satisfyingly complex plot, and a solid example of world building. I am excited to immediately get on with the next novel in this series.