Infinity's Shore by David Brin
Published by Bantam Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
Infinity's Shore is the sequel to Brightness Reef, which was billed as the first of a new trilogy in David Brin's award-winning Uplift universe. The previous book ended on a sharp cliffhanger, leaving our protagonists in a variety of very awkward situations and broadly hinting that some truly extraordinary things were taking place on the world of Jijo. Things that shouldn't be happening, people who shouldn't be there.
Jijo has been declared fallow by the Institute of Migration, which regulates sapient species' access to planets. The Uplift Universe is a perfect example of a post-colonial narrative, even if it never appears on any of the SJWs' reading lists, maybe because David Brin is male and "Jewish" is no longer considered a sufficiently marginalized identity to counterbalance it. Especially now that so many SJW's have thrown their lot in with the very people who've sworn to push Israel into the sea.
But post-colonial this series must be regarded, because one of the most important things to understand about the Uplift Universe is that it is not going to be the Wild West in space, or the Age of Exploration in space. This is not a universe where humans go out and claim planets for themselves, because even planets that may appear empty are in fact owned, and can only be settled if they are properly leased. The first wave of humans to leave the Sol System found that out in very unpleasant ways, including the euthanizing of every member of the New Dawn colony, right down to infants. Those initial misapprehensions brought humanity into very grave danger of extermination, or at best forceable adoption as a client race by an older, established clan.
However, the fact that there are laws with harsh penalties is typically a strong sign that those laws are being broken on a fairly regular basis. And as we learned in Brightness Reef, there are whole communities of beings who flee to fallow worlds to hide, whether to escape a religious war over one or another of the Galactics' obscure quasi-religious beliefs about the Progenitors or to rediscover their heritage that was lost in the process of uplift. But at least on Jijo, most of them feel considerable guilt about what they are doing and as a result try to minimize their impact on the planet. They have also developed a quasi-religion of their own, the Path of Redemption, by which they seek to forget technology and even sapience, and thus return to innocence in hopes that their descendants may be discovered and adopted for uplift when Jijo is once again leased for habitation.
But as we discover in this installment of the second Uplift Trilogy, they have not covered their tracks as well as they thought. They have been followed, and worse, the people secretly seeking them have not covered their own tracks as well as they thought either, which means that there are large numbers of angry Galactics of several species following them.
For the mysterious spaceship hiding on the bottom of Jijo's seas is nothing less than the Streaker, which was last saw at the end of Started Rising, leaving Kithrup behind after having made emergency repairs. So it turns out that this new Uplift Trilogy is in fact intimately tied into the original one and the terrible Uplift War that the humans and dolphins inadvertently ignited when they discovered the ancient fleet in the Shallow Cluster.
And that's just the first few chapters, which is by and large getting us caught back up from where Brightness Reef left off and making sure that new readers can orient themselves. This volume begins introducing us to even wilder concepts, starting with the congealed time that the mulc spider excretes, and which has some very interesting quantum properties which will prove important (in a rather horrific way) in later parts of the novel.
At the same time, we encounter a large number of characters from Brightness Reef, often presented in a way that assumes there's little or no need to provide extensive information about their misadventures on Kithrup. For someone reading the second Uplift Trilogy without the benefit of having read the first, it creates much the same in media res sensation as plunging into Brightness Reef and getting only oblique references to their misadventures in the Shallow Cluster and the mysterious mummy they call Herbie. However, for those of us who have read the first Uplift trilogy, but only some time ago, the little tugs of memory can often be as frustrating as enjoyable. We know we've come across the name before, but can't exactly remember what that character did during Streaker's sojourn on Kithrup, besieged by an alien fleet almost as busy fighting among themselves about picayune details of Galactic religion as in attacking the Terrans.
And we soon learn that a number of the newcomers may well be concealing their purposes and intents in being on forbidden Jijo. Some may be criminals of another kind, coming not to stay and find a hiding place, but to raid something more precious than mere money: genetic material. For while the obligation of Uplift is a core element of Galactic civilization's philosophies, not everyone feels obligated to go about it in ethical ways.
Worse, these gene raiders aren't overly careful about covering their tracks. As long as they can get in and out with out getting caught, they really don't care who they may draw onto the people they leave behind. Including some galactic races with some serious grudges against a number of the races that have taken refuge on this forbidden world.
One of those grudges results in the spectacular destruction of an entire city. Remember the amber globules of congealed time that the mulc spider secretes? It seems that the Jophur, one of the Galactic species who bear a number of grudges against the inhabitants of Jijo, have learned how to use it -- or at least something very similar to it -- as a weapon. The first thing they do with it is bomb the city of the g'Kek, who look like squids in wheelchairs as a result of being one of the few Galactic species with wheels rather than legs. There is some faint hope that the attack was not completely fatal to the last surviving community of g'Kek, that their lives are somehow in indefinite abeyance rather than terminated, and it might someday be possible to rescue them. But that is left as a puzzle, because it is more clear that our protagonists can actually rescue the people in the spaceship the Jophur also bombed with congealed time.
Not that these people are particularly admirable allies -- they came as gene raiders and would be willing to exterminate all the people of Jijo to cover their tracks. But they are still alive, and if our heroes can deny the Jophur their victory, it is one small victory -- and an ally with access to better technology, more comparable to the enemy.
However, to do so involves some very tricky quantum manipulations, and the first few efforts run afoul of inadvertent quantum observer effects. As always, even when David Brin creates fictional technologies from the wildest speculations on the limits of science and technology, to the point of being pure handwavium, he always does it in a logical progression, building upon the implications of known science. It's one of the things that gives the Uplift Universe such a solidity so unlike the wild old stories of adventure and derring-do In Space that made "space opera" a term of opprobrium.
However, the carefully thought out imaginary technologies aren't the only thing that make the Uplift Universe feel so different from the typical old-school space opera. David Weber's Honor Harrington universe is full of fictional technology that is carefully thought out and believably presented, to the point that his info dumps are famous in the fandom. But it feels more like the old-school space opera, even with it being an almost entirely human universe with only a very few, very minor alien species, while the Uplift Universe is as crowded with wildly divergent alien species as the famous cantina scene in Star Wars.
So what is it about the Uplift Universe that makes it feel so different? It's got rapid interstellar travel -- but the wide-open vistas those technologies provide aren't free for the taking, or even the visiting. Every world is owned, which means that to come and go, you've got to get a permission slip from someone or you become a trespasser, with potential harsh penalties, even extermination down to one's genetic rootstock if the damage is severe enough. It creates a very hemmed-in universe that often feels much smaller than it is, even while dealing with big ideas of ancient civilizations and deep time. And that hemmed-in future creates an almost downer feeling that is at odds with the wide-eyed gosh-wow optimism that has been so typical in traditional space opera.
This volume of the second Uplift trilogy ends with the situation on Jijo in even greater disarray, and more than a few characters looking for ways to seek help from someone, anyone who can deal with this wide range of threats. It promises a very interesting grand finale in the third book, especially considering that these three volumes are much more closely co-ordinated than the original Uplift Trilogy.
Review posted June 20, 2018.
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