Rate this book

Infinity's Shore

For the fugitive settlers of Jijo, it is truly the beginning of the end. As starships fill the skies, the threat of genocide hangs over the planet that once peacefully sheltered six bands of sapient beings. Now the human settlers of Jijo and their alien neighbors must make heroic—and terrifying—choices. A scientist must turn against the benefactors she's been trained to love. A heretic must rally believers for a cause he never shared. And four youngsters find that what started as a simple adventure—imitating exploits in Earthling books by Verne and Twain—leads them to the dark abyss of mystery. Meanwhile, the Streaker, with her fugitive dolphin crew, arrives at last on Jijo in a desperate search for refuge. Yet what the crew finds instead is a secret hidden since the galaxies first spawned intelligence—a secret that could mean salvation for the planet and its inhabitants … or their ultimate annihilation.

GenresScience FictionFictionSpace OperaScience Fiction FantasyFantasyAliensSpeculative Fiction

644 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Brin

334 books3,167 followers

David Brin is a scientist, speaker, and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. At least a dozen have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Existence, his latest novel, offers an unusual scenario for first contact. His ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web. A movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on his post-apocalyptic novel, The Postman. Startide Rising won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. The Uplift War also won the Hugo Award.

His non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with secrecy in the modern world. It won the Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.

Brin serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as national defense and homeland security, astronomy and space exploration, SETI, nanotechnology, and philanthropy.

David appears frequently on TV, including "The Universe" and on the History Channel's "Life After People."

Full and updated at:

http://www.davidbrin.com/biography.htm

What do you think?

Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars

2,647 (30%)

4 stars

3,618 (41%)

3 stars

2,001 (23%)

2 stars

321 (3%)

1 star

60 (<1%)

Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews

Dirk Grobbelaar

608 reviews1,138 followers

March 1, 2024

All that might have impressed him once – the idea of vessels millions of years old. But now he knew a truth about these ancient hulks.
You want old. I’ve seen old.
I’ve seen ships that make most stars seem young.

There’s considerable heft to Brin’s Uplift Universe, especially in a genre consisting of big concepts and hypothetical histories. Concepts surrounding the Galactics and the protocols for Uplift feel very concrete, or substantial. It doesn’t necessary feel like you are reading Science Fiction here (even though it obviously is exactly that); a paradox that is difficult to put words to.

Is it because of the intimacy of his novels? The focus isn’t always on the big event, but rather on characters who may, or may not, know what their contributions are in the bigger scheme of unfolding events.

Even so, this is pretty much high concept Science Fiction, and Brin doesn’t quite let you forget that the stakes are enormously high, and that the universe is enormously large.

Time would barely touch them until this fallow galaxy and its myriad star systems were awarded to new legal tenants, and the spiral arms once more teemed with commerce.

Infinity’s Shore features a bewildering array of point-of-view characters. In addition to characters carried over from Brightness Reef there are also characters carried over from Startide Rising. There is a convergence of storylines at this point, tying the Uplift Storm trilogy to the earlier Uplift novels, as we edge closer to Heaven's Reach which is the final Uplift novel.

No one can doubt that mysterious forces do exist – ancient, aloof, influential. Might we have crossed fates with some cryptic power, here in an abandoned galaxy, far from home?

What will be the final fate of Earthclan? I don’t want to go into the whole rigmarole of Uplift, patrons and wolflings at this point, suffice to say that Earthclan appears to be only surviving by craftiness, determination and pure luck so far. Juxtaposed against this, the hubris of the Galactics.

It seems that chance, or fate, or more pertinently Lady Luck, favours Earthclan.

We are caught in the slowly grinding gears of a machine more vast than we imagined.
[]
Sometimes I think humanity would have been better off just staying in bed.

It’s almost impossible to review Infinity’s Shore in isolation. It’s a wonderful book, but a big part of that is context. The Uplift series is a stone cold classic for good reason. High drama on both galactic and intimate scale. The concept of Uplift in itself also lends itself to some philosophical waxing that never seems out of place.

His mind filled with an image of poignant, awful beauty. A tapestry spanning thousands of years – human history seen from afar. A tale of frightened orphans, floundering in ignorance. Of creatures smart enough to stare in wonder at the stars, asking questions of a night that never answered, except with terrifying silence.

Yet again, an easy five stars. The only criticism I could level at Infinity’s Shore is that it ends on a doozy of a cliffhanger. A good thing then that I already have a copy of Heaven’s Reach.

Yet he found his heart torn by the tragic story of Homo Sapiens, the self-taught wolflings of Terra. It was a bittersweet tale, pulling from his reluctant eyes trickles of tart brine that tasted like the sea.

books-i-own must-read-in-2023 science-fiction

Kara Babcock

1,989 reviews1,427 followers

February 1, 2011

Shit just got real!

OK, so remember how Brin left off Brightness Reef on a cliffhanger? Jophur ship had just landed above the returned Rothen vessel, totally changing the balance of power on Jijo. Sara and the starfaring Stranger, whom we now know to be Emerson from the Streaker escaped the zealots and have fallen in with a group horse-riding human women and urs. Dwer and Rety are stuck on a mad robot. Oh, and Alvin and his comrades sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where they were rescued by mechanical crustaceans.

I kind of suspected that Alvin's rescuers would be Streaker dolphins. It was very neat and tidy. Indeed, Brin wastes no time cutting to the chase and revealing all of this to us. And it turns out the Streaker has been through a lot in the interim—which is a great relief to me, because it has been nearly a year since I read Startide Rising , and I could barely remember who Emerson was, let alone how he got separated from the ship (turns out it happened between books). Much worse for wear, Streaker just so happened to find refuge in Jijo's oceans. And then the Jophur showed up.

I already discussed my fascination with the traeki in my review of Brightness Reef, so I'll keep this brief. The Jophur are easily the best part of this book. They combine the intriguing properties of the traeki with the one thing that the Uplift books often lack: a convincing villain. (The Gubru were OK in The Uplift War , but I couldn't stop thinking of them as giant dodos, and that ruined them for me. In contrast, the Jophur are rather unlike anything on Earth. They are different, and that is cool.) Watching Asx lose itself/themselves to the master ring and become Ewasx saddened me; I was glad his rings managed to rebel once in a while. Even better was getting a glimpse at the command structure of the Jophur vessel, as well as its potential goals regarding Jijo and recovering the Streaker. The fact that the Jophur patently just didn't care about anyone, and in fact were actively hostile to the g'Keks, made them great villains. They were willing to raise towns and destroy the sooners' holy artifact, the Egg. I love a good bad guy willing to follow through on threats!

So Infinity's Shore has a great bad guy. What about the matching good guys? Our protagonists are a melange of the new and the old. Returning from Startide Rising are some old friends, including Gillian, the Niss machine, and Kaa. (For some reason my brain always imagines AIs speaking in the voice of Morgan Freeman, so I found the Niss machine very endearing.) I honestly don't remember many of my feelings toward Gillian, Kaa, et al, so I gave them the benefit of a doubt. And really, none of them are as important to the plot as the protagonists who return from Brightness Reef: Dwer, Sara, Lark, Alvin, etc. These characters are the freshest in our minds, and some of them are genuinely better.

Just as the dolphins lurking at the bottom of the ocean were rather predictable, I'm pretty sure Brin couldn't have made the mutual attraction between Lark and Ling any more obvious except by beginning their names with the same le—oh. I see what you did there! Very clever, Mr. Brin. Still, Infinity's Shore isn't a romance, and the love between 2 Ls blossoms while they are prisoner aboard a Jophur ship. It's sweet, and it happens amid action scenes and some moody meditation on Lark's part about his feelings, as a voluntary extinctionist heretic, about falling in love and possibly wanting children. Moody though it may be, however, it serves a real purpose: change has come to Jijo, and no one is going to be the same.

I suppose you could call this book "apocalyptic" in the sense that the Sacred Scrolls of the Jijoan sooners have always predicted a "Judgement Day" from above. Now it's come, and everything is going to hell, because you know what? When starships descend from on high, suddenly all those sacred stanzas just don't quite prepare you for the sheer pants-soiling, hoof-tripping, wheel-blocking, claw-catching terror of the moment. It is no big surprise that most people, despite their nominal devotion to the Scrolls, prefer not to react hastily and begin destroying signs of civilization. Similarly, it is no big surprise that a small portion of people believe the opposite. So even as a powerful interstellar force threatens all the sooners on Jijo, we see their society begin to fracture, their precious Commons peace falling apart.

These politics never quite take centre stage. We don't learn much about how the sooners will react to these events until the very end of the book, and that's fine. This isn't a work of political intrigue; it's more a quick-and-dirty action-adventure. Though Sara and Lark are both exposed to the fallout from some of the more extreme groups, they also have their own, more immediate problems to resolve, so they are on the fringe of these politics. Sara manages to fall in with Uriel, the renowned urrish smith who had the foresight to build an analog computer, while Lark and Ling, as I mentioned above, make out on a Jophur ship. It's all good.

Because unlike Brightness Reef, which tended to flounder and waver until the last hundred pages, Infinity's Shore constantly feels like it is building toward something. Some of the foreshadowing and hints are annoying, even trite—I'm not a fan of the idea that Buyur somehow planned all this a million years ago. That being said, Brin has done a good job creating a tantalizing 150-million-year backstory, and I am now excited about reading Heaven's Reach and finally learning what's going on (again, if that doesn't happen, don't spoil it for me). So even with a few flaws, the fact that this book manages to excite me and make me eager for its sequel is great, especially when it's the middle book in a trilogy.

Stepping back for a moment, even the story in this book builds to an epic conclusion. We know there has to be some kind of showdown between the Streaker and the Jophur ship, and Brin doesn't disappoint us. He finally seems to have a grasp on this whole multiple, shifting perspectives narration, and in those last critical chapters, he moves us effortlessly among perspectives as the action unfolds. Dwer finds himself taking an unscheduled trip in a hot-air balloon and ends up in an unexpected reunion with guess who (saw that one coming). Streaker heads off on a suicide mission to pull the Jophur away from Jijo. Will they escape? Will they finally find sanctuary and succour? Will they—

Well, damn. David Brin ended on a cliffhanger. Again. You know what? Fine then. If he can end on a cliffhanger, so can I. Final verdict on Infinity's Shore is…

Stay tuned at the end of the week for my review of Heaven's Reach and the exciting conclusion to this review of Infinity's Shore!*

*(Disclaimer: Conclusion may not contain 100% fresh excitement. Please ask your physician if artificial excitement is right for you. If your excitement lasts for longer than four hours, call your doctor.)

This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.

2011-read own science-fiction

prcardi

538 reviews84 followers

June 9, 2017

Storyline: 4/5
Characters: 3/5
Writing Style: 2/5
World: 4/5

A creative confusion unburdened by the strictures of brevity. Infinity's Shore is unpolished and unrestrained in the same way as the Uplift series has been all along. Despite the unnecessary profusion of characters perspectives, the staccato snippets of parallel storylines, and the distraction of ever-burgeoning galactic side-machinations, Brin tells a great story. For suspense, excitement, and wondrous developments there is not another Uplift book to match this iteration.

Brin made an attempt to remedy some of the concerns I noted in my review of Brightness Reef. The new information makes the undergirding rationale for Jijo in the first book more plausible, but still leaves some unfilled plotholes. There are also some retcons . While not necessarily changing how things worked previously in the Five Galaxies, these do squeeze in a little awkwardly. My biggest complaint is that this is an even worse to-be-continued ending than the last one. This was truly unnecessary and unforgivable, disrespectful to readers. I would have been really frustrated had I had to wait two years to get the ending to events that had very nearly reached a climax . Fortunately, I don't have to! I'll be eagerly starting Heaven's Reach before long.

evolution other-world pg-13

Liutauras Elkimavičius

438 reviews95 followers

February 6, 2017

Tarkim rašai knygą apie karą. Yra tokia šeima, kuri bus labai svarbi kare. Tėvas išsiaiškins slaptus priešų kodus. Mama išgelbės krūvą pasmerktųjų. Vyresnysis sūnus - šnipas, nužudys svarbų, ne, svarbiausią, priešų generolą. Dukra, mokslininkė, atras naują bombų rūšį ir taip karas bus laimėtas. O dar yra dėdė, maršalas vadovaujantis visam laivynui. Senelis, kurio karinėmis gudrybėmis naudojasi tankų divizijos. Pusbrolis diplomatas, kuris susitarė su sąjungininkais. Fabrikantė trečios eilės teta, kuri tiekia konservus ir tt ir pan. Žiauriai svarbi šeima, be to kurios tas karas būtų pralaimėtas. Bet David Brin rašo ne apie karą. Tiksliau karas užima paskutinius 100 iš 800 psl. Knyga prasideda, kaip senelis... Augina rožes. Jokių tetų ir pusbrolių dar nėra. Va kaip iš toli pradeda savo rašymą Brin. Ir tai mane užknisa. Puiki idėja ir jos vystymas, bet ta suknista 'įžanga'. Turbūt kažkam tos 'rožės' labai įdomios, bet aš tai lyg ir norėjau knygos apie karą... #Recom, bet aš jau labai prisivertinėsiu skaityt paskutinę, 6 dalį. #LEBooks

Zina

358 reviews20 followers

December 19, 2022

This is a continuation of the Uplift storm. Something's really weird is going on the faraway planet of JiJo where six sooner races including humans lived in relative peace and accord until these various entities started arriving.
As always, I do not want to have spoilers here - but you more or less have to read this and the next book in the trilogy to finally make sense of it all. This world is well developed and complex, and there is some progenitor race that might or might not be behind it all. This is quality science fiction.
The story has several arcs and several points of symmetry, if that's a term, an interesting composition.

sci-fi

Palmyrah

262 reviews65 followers

February 6, 2017

Run-of-the-mill genre SF, hastily written for a market. The plot creaks as it winds through its predictable twists and turns. The action, however, is made confusingly hard to follow due to the author’s trick of creating cheap tension by switching back and forth from one storyline to another at critical moments. The characters are stock and overdue for retirement from Sci-fi Central Casting. The heroes are neatly labeled and satisfyingly invulnerable, even when they suffer grievous wounds and traumas. The villains are hapless and implausible, though gratifyingly stinky; essentially, they're semi-ambulatory, Fascist turds. There are some sub-villains, too, but they are unworthy of notice, and the author gives them short shrift.

The window-dressing includes alien pets, not very cute, and some intelligent dolphins who bore the reader with bad verse. There are intelligent crablike beings, too. Of all stock alien types, intelligent crablike beings must surely be the most boring of all.

This book has no plot. The whole thing is just one long chase, though everybody appears to be running in different directions. They’ve been running for a while; we’re in Book Two of a trilogy which also happens to be part of a larger series, and it looks like the chase has been going on through all the previous novels, too. Apparently several godlike interstellar Great Powers have been chasing a single puny spaceship round five galaxies for what must by now be actual aeons, without either catching it or sensibly giving up. What bloody stupid Great Powers they must be.

They don’t (spoiler, though not really) catch our heroic fugitives in this book either. In fact, this book with no plot has no actual ending. So if you still want to read Infinity's Shore, be warned that you’ll have to shell out for the sequel, too, if you want to make sense of it. I would advise you not to bother.

Tatiana

150 reviews164 followers

September 17, 2009

Call this one a 2.5 star book. I do want to know what happens. There are plenty of cliffhangers throughout and some big ones at the end. I like some of the characters, Dwer, Emerson, Rety, maybe Gillian. The aliens are cool and very different from any other aliens I've read about in 30 years of reading Science Fiction. So I give him a lot of points for originality and inventiveness. He seems to think up new and different alien species effortlessly. The science is good, which is a huge plus.

But... he still is just not a very good writer, I'm afraid to say. The way he jumps from viewpoint to viewpoint is unpleasant and amateurish. I realized last night that these stories would make really good Saturday morning cartoons. In short episodes they would be much more fun and palatable. The ... cartoonishness is the only word ... of the characters and plot wouldn't jar in that venue. And the series could go on forever, as one feels this book series ultimately will. I mean, why not? As long as people keep buying them why end it? It's beginning to have that feel of the fifth book in the trilogy, if you know what I mean, and not in a good Hitchhikery way, either.

So I have one more left, and I'm going to start it today, but I've got some Ursula K. Le Guin books on the way from Amazon, so when they arrive there's no telling if I'll finish Heaven's Reach ever or not.

sciencefiction

John Devlin

Author 23 books92 followers

May 13, 2007

Brin's continuing saga of the Streaker. A strong read that only fails in that it isn't as great as Startide Rising.

Evan Peterson

225 reviews10 followers

July 29, 2020

Done here and plunging on to the final book in the series, Heaven's Reach. This one went on hiatus lost behind a couch for almost a year..so took a little while for me to remember what was going on when I left off.

So far..the bad reviews of books in this series tend to be people who like to start at book #4 or #5 in a six book series and discover that
A: they can't figure out what is going on
B: they don't like the authors writing style.

These criticisms are valid though. If you are expecting a linear easy to follow plotline from only one or at most two viewpoints as is usual for most of the Hard SciFi genre, you will not find it here. David Brin puts the elements of character development, world building, and meta/philosophical points at the forefront of his novels. As a result plot is often lost in the shuffle.

This author could have easily just concentrated on the action/plot alone and written a couple of dozen formulaic sci fi action hero books set in this universe.The protagonist of the prequel Sundiver clearly had a whole series in him.. and various book long adventures that were never written of the perilous journey of the Streaker are relegated to a few paragraphs .... but he clearly wasn't interested in that. Brin seems to choose only plotlines and character arcs that he deems essential to understanding the larger societal and cultural changes going on in the large Universe he has created..and glosses over the rest.

I will write more once I am done with the last book.. but as always he ends on a cliffhanger.. a little apprehensive as Brin has a track record of leaving the end up to the speculation of the reader... I just wish he would follow the example of Eric Flint and farm out those untold action adventure sci fi stories to other authors. He may not be interested in those stories.. but the readers certainly are.

Like one of the characters says near the end of the book
No one really needs me
Face it. You're going out of curiosity
...
Because you want to see what happens next

alien-society hard-sci-fi lococentric-fiction

Shannon

268 reviews3 followers

May 30, 2023

Book two in the second Uplift trilogy. If book one missed anything, it was the POV of the alien antagonist, a role filled out here quite nicely by the Jophur. Brin does such a fantastic job of creating and fleshing out the alien races - not just their biology, but their thought processes, their psychology. The Jophur need to dominate clearly comes from the way in which they, themselves, are dominated by their master rings. While they claim to love these rings, that they were perfected as a race by a strong, guiding hand, which turned the disparate rings which must reach a consensus into a single being instead, it seems obvious that they're threatened by seeing their "cousins" who live a more gentle, pastoral way of life. That psychological depth, which remains subtextual throughout, made the Ewasx chapters very powerful.

The one misstep, I felt, was the decision to join the Streaker crew in medias res. So much had happened since we'd seen them last, I actually got online to double-check that I hadn't somehow missed a book. Sometimes catching the reader up with slowly-delivered exposition works, but more often than not - and as was the case here - the characters helpfully don't remember/think about certain events until it's a more climactic time. What happened to Emerson? He can't remember, of course, but everyone else on Streaker does. But none of them will think about it (in view of the pesky reader) until Emerson has his grand epiphany. Then it's okay for the rest of us to know. All narrative is artifice, of course, but it just got a little too artificial for me.

The last 100 pages slap.

aliens science-fiction

Craig

704 reviews17 followers

January 20, 2018

Only read about 50 pages. I've learned to be very wary of authors who start their book with a list of 75 characters. The map is less of cautionary item. The final straw is that there are 6 different species on this world. So all together you're left to deal with at least 100 words of random letters that you don't quite know for sure if it's a name of an individual, place or species. Then randomly assemble the creatures from various mammal, crustacean, bird and lizard parts. Maybe if I had started with book one, the author might go through more of a building process to introduce all of this. But as it is, it may as well be written in Greek.

dnf

Kelly Flanagan

396 reviews47 followers

May 5, 2011

David Brin is fast becoming another of my favorite authors. Especially with this series. I do love the alien races he has created, and the way they are able to mesh together on the planet Jijo as they don't anywhere else in the universe. The idea of all sapient races having been 'uplifted' by a patron race except Humans.
The whole premise of his universe and peoples are intricate and all consuming. I couldn't put either of the books in this series down until I finished them.

Sandi

1,597 reviews47 followers

August 29, 2015

While I wish this book was a bit more tightly written with less POV characters it did seem to move the story forward and give me hope that the final book in the trilogy will tie together all the different dangling threads. This was a rather long audio clocking in at a bit over 26 hours so thankfully the narration by George Wilson was excellent.

audio read-2015 scifi-fantasy-horror-althistory

Adam Whitehead

559 reviews138 followers

May 13, 2017

Peace has endured on the world of Jijo, where six races shelter from the wider civilisation of the Five Galaxies, for decades. That peace has now been shattered by the arrival of a starship of the Jophur, a powerful Galactic race, searching for the fugitive Terran exploration vessel Streaker and the billion-year-old secrets it contains. As members of the six races struggle to survive under the brutal Jophur occupation, the crew of the beleaguered Streaker realise they must draw the Jophur away from Jijo and its innocent population, even if the cost is their own destruction...

Infinity's Shore, the fifth and penultimate book in David Brin's Uplift Saga, picks up moments after the end of Brightness Reef, with the arrival of a Jophur warship spelling disaster for the refugee nations of the Slope. The opening of the novel successfully gets across the scale of this chaos, with the Jophur brutally 'altering' the traeki ambassador Asx with the imposition of a master ring (traeki are gestalt entities consisting of independently intelligent rings which combine to form a sentient being; Jophur have a 'master ring' which dominates and controls the others), slaughtering some of the inhabitants ruthlessly and then engaging in clandestine negotiations with criminal elements to try and splinter the six races from one another. We briefly met the Jophur in Startide Rising, but Infinity's Shore delves much more deeply into their characters and we discover how unpleasant they can really be. This is emphasised by an interesting narrative device, where the first-person musings of Asx in the previous novel continue, but now under the aegis of 'Ewasx', the same being now perverted into a full Jophur. This gives us a somewhat schizophrenic POV character who is desperately trying to keep his other intelligences under control through the application of pain, which is an original, if dark, idea. Brin's writing skills here are first rate, as Asx continues to be a character in his own right, and the reader has to puzzle out what he is up to under Ewasx's very nose (or olfactory ring sense organ, more accurately) through limited information.

Elsewhere, the novel unfolds across a number of POV characters. The purpose of the very large cast of the first book is now revealed, as the events become even more epic. Different factions choose to fight or side with the Jophur on a large scale, whilst a few characters are now revealed to be in contact with the crew of the Streaker. We also get additional POVs from the crew of the Streaker as we learn what they've been up to since we last saw them blasting free from the Kithrup system in Startide Rising. It's a complex structure that sometimes threatens to become ungainly, but Brin maintains the cohesion of the narrative, and he admirably finds time to drop in a few POV chapters that are not strictly necessary but are there to provide atmosphere and colour, showing the scale of the unrest triggered by the arrival of the spacecraft.

Infinity's Shore manages to escape 'middle book' syndrome due to is structure: whilst there is a further book to come, Heaven's Reach, Infinity's Shore successfully wraps up most of the storylines on Jijo, and the planet is (somewhat regretfully, as Brin's worldbuilding skills here are impressive) left behind at the end of the novel as the focus switches squarely to the crew of the Streaker. This gives us a lot of endings and conclusions at the end of the book, with only a couple of cliffhangers left for the next book (though these are quite large).

Brin's skills with characters are impressive, with Asx/Ewasx being the most notable, but we also get great stuff from Emerson (the semi-amnesiac human who has lost the power of speech due to torture but can still communicate through song), Alvin (the Arthur C. Clarke-loving hoon whose journal extracts drive part of the story) and Gillian (the commander of the Streaker following the events of Startide Rising), not to mention the return of a number of dolphin POVs which continue to be entertaining. Brin also successfully builds tension as Streaker tries to escape the Jophur, but in a manner that will also leave Jijo free from reprisals, and various plans are outlined and tested before one is found that might just work. There are also some great details on technology, such as the steampunk non-digital computer that one character builds, or the various genetically-engineered insects and other lifeforms of Jijo that have tasks programmed into them from millions of years ago that the refugees can suit to their own ends.

As the novel continues, Brin laces in hints that something much bigger is afoot. Markings on some of the ships abandoned on the ocean floor, abnormalities in the hyperspace transfer points approaching Jijo and some strange problems in the Galactic Library's historical record suggest something else is happening, something so vast it will utterly dwarf even the chaos and warfare unleashed across the Five Galaxies by Streaker's activities. This then leaves the reader eager to learn more in the final, monstrously cataclysmic novel in the series.

Infinity's Shore (****½) is an inventive, enjoyable and page-turning SF nove that rounds off a number of storylines from the preceding books and sets things up well for the grand finale.

M. Malmierca

323 reviews385 followers

October 17, 2016

Reseña en el primer libro de la saga.

3 reviews

1 review

Great read!

stressad hud lugna den
pigmentfläckar tips
fet hud guide balansera huden
kroppslotion
skönhetstips vintersäsongen
skönhetsprodukter naturligt
torr hud i ansiktet tips
är serum bättre än ansiktskräm
hudvårdsserie
cellulitbehandling hemma funkar det
kroppsinpackning tips bästa resultat
stockholm beauty week nominerade produkter
kroppsrengöring välj rätt
kroppsskrubb använder bäst
kroppsrengöring välj rätt
ansiktsserum guide
anti age serum bästa tips
nattkram anti age bäst
dagkram anti age guide åldrande hud
återfuktande ansiktsmask
ögonkräm anti age fem fördelar
hudvardskit guide
solkräm tips
stressad hud
bästa ansiktsvattnet testa
bästa toning lotion
rynkor under ögonen 20 tips
bästa kroppsskrubben testa
känslig hud 10 tips
ansiktsrengöring guide fräsch hud
hudvårdsprodukter sommaren 10 tips
bästa body lotion testa
bästa solkrämen testa
hudtyper guide
bästa rengöringskrämen testa

Martti

743 reviews

June 30, 2023

I took a little break from the Uplift series, becasue the book no 4 was such a bore. This one is a direct continuation. Still a weird bunch of aliens that all meld together, because nobody has much personality. I'm unable to relate to any of them. Unnecessarily prolonged trilogy, feeling like a money grab, not because the story demands it.

An attempt was made to create some tension, but I just couldn't find anything surprising or much of interest anywhere here. The eyes just glaze over the generic invulnerable heroes who all feel the same.

In David Brin's Uplift universe, whole species play with the fate of other species. Genocide is a Standard Operating Procedure. Which is the main reason of the whole universe being too alien to relate in any meaningful way.

Also you can feel the burden of a pre-Internet universe with ships not having any information networking. Instead they have some "library cubes" that get updated about once in a thousand years, which is just ridiculous.

There is an attempt to leave it as a surprise, but I think it was already clear in the last book that we have Streaker, the ship manned mainly by uplifted dolphins was bound to the great library of the five galaxies. It's come to visit this trilogy from uplift book number 2 - Startide Rising. The whole book is the ship hiding and then trying to evade capture by using hordes of decoys. Jophur battleship pursues and we need anther book. Ugh. This was mostly clear already from the ending of the last book, no?

Bill

305 reviews

November 14, 2023

(2.5 Stars)

We continue learning about Jijo and the species and people on it. They interact with Streaker and fight against each other, the Jophur ship that has landed, and the Rothen and its human allies that were already present.

I think I would enjoy this book (and several other Brin novels) if they had fewer perspectives presented. I'm not particularly interested in the different way a crab person experiences a situation versus a human or a centaur person. Some of the plot events in the story are kind of dumb, and we don't get a great idea the overarching timeline involved. There is a lot of deux ex machina here, where it is revealed that something that doesn't make sense was actually planned a hundred years ago and had generations of beings working on it, etc.

Through all of this, we get no closer to understanding what Streaker's crew found. We do get the unpleasant experience of feeling like we missed a book, as there are plentiful references to events that happened off the page. Some of those get fleshed out as we go, but less in a revealing way and more in an, oh, by the way... way.

Anyway, this book was fine. I'm hoping the next one has something to do with telling us what Streaker found, which is the most interesting and least represented thing here.

This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.

Bill

Author 13 books21 followers

May 18, 2017

Just as with the first book in the Uplift Storm trilogy, there's a lot of complexities with aliens and human mentalities and sociological subplots. Brin is the best world builder as he includes so many plots points and flavors... I know its too much for some people. But I love it, for exactly the same reason I dislike Lord of The Ring... too many details that make it more of a travelogue than a novel.

BUT... here the characters aren't just walking through a landscape and taking it in and maybe reacting to it as they take each step in their quest coupon collecting. In Brin's Uplift universe, the setting is the the lens that filters and adjusts all character interactions and their alien viewpoints are yet another lens.

Also, this book is totally Furry. You have "hummicking" aliens that are anthropomophing themselves, you have talking Dolphins and Chimps that use sign language (and have math degrees). And then you have stranger aliens still that found peace on this old world after their cousins were uplifted too high.

And it's done on hard science.

The characters continue to delight me. And I really cannot wait to see what happens in the third book (its on order).

Stardreamer

10 reviews

May 18, 2018

The previous book was confusing to read as there were too many characters being shifted between which was headache inducing but improved as the centers of action resolved. This book brings fully into play the story plot involving the Streaker's crew from Startide Rising which was a glad addition as open ending of that book always left me wanting to know their fate.

There is still two many point of view characters that make the reading a bit painful. The conversion of one of the point of view characters Asx from 'good guy' native to a bad guy invader is a very interesting plot twist that gives you a great insight not just of the invaders themselves but of inner workings of one of the most alien of the species living on the planet.

Overall a very enjoyable book and I'm looking forward to the next book hopefully winding up the story of our intrepid colonists and long suffering Dolphin/Human crew of the Streaker.

Laurie Sand

378 reviews2 followers

July 12, 2018

Hallelujah, free at last! Events started to pick up toward the end (and I mean REALLY at the end, like 85% through the book) and enough complex stuff actually happens that I can't recommend skipping straight from Brightness Reef to Heaven's Reach, but Lord Almighty was this book an exasperating read. So much rehashing of events from the previous book, in combination with an irritating tendency on the part of author to use simple past tense in places where past perfect would have been more appropriate, left me with absolutely no sense of tension or immediacy. That said, I have to give credit where credit is due in terms of the level of detail and world building--these elements are the only reason I gave 3 stars instead of 1.

Warren Dunn

Author 7 books2 followers

July 28, 2019

All of a sudden, the tension has been cranked up several notches, and it shows no sign of slowing down. The story has quickly become much more complex, and is so much better for it. The characters have grown, and aside from a few episodes that were obviously designed for the sole purpose of getting a character from one place to the next, everything flowed naturally.
Since I still knew many of the characters and the species, and I took time off from the first book, Brightness Reef, things were much easier to settle into at the beginning of this book. There was certainly no lack of interest anywhere, and right from the beginning of the book, things had grown much, much more dangerous on Jijo.
http://ossuslibrary.tripod.com/Bk_SF/...

science-fiction science-fiction-alien

David

350 reviews

February 10, 2019

Bit difficult going at the start mainly because of the multitude of characters and their different physical attributes and traits! Actually I had forgotten I had read the first book in the second series until chapter two where sections, including the unresolved ending, came back to me! More enjoyable the more you get into it until it was difficult to put down, and wildly imaginative. I will now have to read the third book before I forget what has happened to date. Strongly recommended but please, read them in order.

Robyn Blaber

467 reviews14 followers

August 31, 2020

I want to like this more, but I'm pretty sure the author wrote it for TV and not for reading. The rapid flashing back between characters almost always at some cliffhanger leaves you feeling like nothing ever happens... or that you're missing the action and finding out about it after the fact. For such an amazingly long book... there's is lots of time to tell the character stories one at a time. The exact sequencing is just not needed.

american-literature science-fiction

Jacob

28 reviews

March 10, 2022

To me, this book felt a bit weak compared to the previous entry - it is also a partial retread of the same plot. The last book was about interlopers from space landing on Jijo and shattering their fragile peace, and this book is about... different interlopers landing on Jijo and shattering their fragile peace, but bigger! This is a recurring problem as we will see with the final book in the trilogy.

Eva Kristin

347 reviews5 followers

October 25, 2023

In my opinion the best book of the series, and one of the best I've read this year. Brin keeps amazing me with his creativity, and he's managed to create several characters, human and non-human, that I deeply care about. I'm looking at you, Asx, you beautiful pile of slimy doughnuts, you!

I'm looking forward to reading the next and conclusive volume, but I can gardly remember the last time I was this reluctant for a series to be over.

George Sagen

1 review

October 18, 2021

More low vs high tech war

Lots of simultaneous story lines slowly converge. Good variety of beings, personalities, and environs. Bit of a cliff hanger so I'm glad Kindle format let's me instantly move to the next book. What's the deal with all Sci fi hardware having a part called a motivator. Is Brin making fun of Star Wars?

Bryce Leo

25 reviews

April 8, 2024

Starting to get frustrated with the sheer quantity of storylines that just get dropped. I'm not really hopeful that it will get resolved in the third book and if they don't it's going to tank my feelings on the series. Looking forward to finishing book 6 and then branching back out to other authors and stories.

Rob Markley

859 reviews8 followers

January 20, 2018

Brin takes this trilogy to more and more exciting levels with volume #2. The Dolphins are amongst the most wonderful ideas every developed in scifi while the uplift galaxy is amongst the most intimidating prospects. What a combination!

scifi

Displaying 1 - 30 of 121 reviews

More reviews and ratings