David Brin

Beware of spoilers!

This book is, with more than 800 pages (at least that's what my e-reader says) a pretty hefty brick. But it's also a book about ideas, and Brin is very thorough in his exploration of these ideas, even if it happens at the expense of cohesive plot and character arcs.

What's it about? He gives his very own answer to the Fermi paradox, the question why no alien lifeform has made contact in any form when it's reasonable to assume that Earth is not particularly special and there's life basically everywhere.

However, the main topic is not so much his answer to this specific question - that countless alien civilisations swarm the galaxy like viruses with the sole purpose to replicate themselves and to push their victims into inevitable self-destruction - but the reaction of humanity to these discoveries.

"Humanity" is by no means a unified entity, though; 10 billions live on a planet ravaged by ecological disasters and exploitation, in a global society which is highly technologised and dependent on AI on one side and highly fragmented and hierarchical on the other. There are several degrees of technology sceptics, there are the technology believers and supporters who want advancement at all costs, there are the super-rich oligarchs with their own agenda, there are autistics who fight for their recognition not as an abnormality, but as a different development strand. There are AIs and enhanced animals, formerly extinct lifeforms and ancient alien spaceships - and all of these have a voice and an opinion, fears and hopes.

It's a cacophony, and it reads like one - as complex as chaotic. Some of these voices get a lot of page-time, and those are the ones that remain. I loved Tor Povlov, journalist gone hero gone cyborg-explorer-in-space. Gerald Livingston, the pragmatic trash collector in orbit who sets the whole thing in motion, and Hamish Brookeman, the former bestseller author too busy with propaganda to listen to the voices in his head. But there are also too many characters who get no development, who are discarded after they served their function to illustrate a certain idea or side-topic. Did we really need the POV of a psychic octopus? A lot of redundancies and wasted potential here.

And then there's the inserts, little interludes that interrupt the main narrative. An essay about all the ways how humanity - and any developed civilisation - could have (and perhaps should have) destroyed itself. The poetic but barely intelligible thoughts of an autistic person. The challenges to aliens that may or may not hide somewhere in the solar system and refuse to make contact.

And still, in the end this whole cacophony makes sense. Because, what remains? It's the fact that our diversity is our greatest strength. Our diversity, our flexibility, our ability to emphasise, to accept and - most important of all - to adapt. It's what saves us, in the end, and it's an overall optimistic, hopeful view on mankind and its future that Brin presents here.… (mer)