It started upon stepping off the cruise zep, when a Darktide agent sent her to use a public shower, because her favorite body scent—legal in California—too closely matched a pheromonic allure-compound that New Mexico banned. Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.One interesting idea/prediction I noted was that most large cities have moved the majority of billboard-style advertising into virtual layers, since physical signs can be automatically ad-blocked and erased from view by anyone wearing specs. In contrast, and a reversal of current reality, smaller towns where VR use is less common still have billboards at "layer one", i.e. reality, resulting in Time-square-like bombardment.
Though all this bustle kind of overwhelmed a poor city girl—with no volume settings or brightness sliders to tone it all down.Spoilers ahead.
There are some great, dramatic plot reveals such as when Gerald puts his hand on the first artifact and sees the outline of a hand that's...thinner and has six fingers. Or slightly later with the dramatic proclamations of "JOIN US" and "Liars".
Though many, I thought most of the POVs contributed well to the story....except Hacker's. This weird Cast-Away magic dolphin rescue story was an annoyance when I just wanted to read about what was going on with the aliens.
And, slightly related, I really hated "twinned parrot brains" for communication encryption, since it seemed both incredibly unlikely and impractical, especially compared to the fairly convenient current methods of encryption that were supposedly replaced by this system. Key distribution is already an incredibly difficult problem when it is just bits, imagine how hard it is when it's a living breathing animal. A whole new dimension on key storage and maintenance...
But all of that pales in comparison to the hate I had for Prof. Fake Rasta Noozone. Reading him was infuriating:
No one is trying to be nasty space-zutopong, or out to vank de competition with bad-bwoy bizness.
Hey, I grok when a mon preten’ to be a ginnygog, in order to mess wit’ our heads.A large part of the novel is essentially an anthropological discussion of the effects on a society of first contact: the conflicts it creates, the motivations of both sides, and the common outcomes, i.e. the lower-technology side loses big time. At times Brin shifts into lecture exposition mode to deliver history lessons in this vein, which I found boring and rather unnecessary, duplicating information being delivered by the movement of the story.
It was especially poignant reading about the idea of "indignation junkies" in the era of Donald Trump's candidacy for president:
...gambling can be a genuine addiction, requiring as much effort to break as cocaine of kicx...and then there are the indignation junkies. People who regularly get high off self-righteousness and sanctimony. You know the kind—we all do.Yes, yes I do.
The novel spends the majority of it's time in this first-contact timeline, then there is an abrupt jolt forward to a time when Earth has built a number of large conventional space exploration craft and some chain-letter artifacts of its own. I think this move forward was a good idea to explore the later ramifications of how the contact played out, but it was rather poorly bolted onto the story. It probably would have made more sense to break it into the next book.
But once we are in this new time it's really interesting. The mechanics of the fractal-like size adjustment, creation of objects, and travel inside the artifact crystal itself were fantastically imagined and presented in a really interesting way. I also liked the ominous observations and vastness of scope as viewed through the Lurker, Seeker etc.
A very thought provoking read, a bit heavier on anthropology lectures than I would have liked.
4 stars.
