SEARCHING FOR A NEW HOME… Chanokh’s torture comes to an end as the fog clears, the hatch opens, and his friend and fellow hacker, Tom, greets him…by stabbing a screwdriver into his heart. This is the first time William dies.
It is not the last.
When he wakes from death, William discovers that all but one crew member—Capria Dixon—is either dead at Tom’s hands, or escaped to the surface of Kepler 452b. This dire situation is made worse when Tom attacks again—and is killed. Driven mad by a rare reaction to extended cryo-sleep, Tom hacked the Galahad’s navigation system and locked the ship on a faster-than-light journey through the universe, destination: nowhere. Ever.
Mysteriously immortal, William is taken on a journey with no end, where he encounters solitary desperation, strange and violent lifeforms, a forbidden love, and the nature of reality itself.
…HE DISCOVERS THE INFINITE.
Jeremy Robinson, the master of fast-paced and highly original stories seamlessly blending elements of horror, science fiction, and thrillers, tackles his most ambitious subject matter to date: reality itself. An amalgam of the works of J.J. Abrams and Ridley Scott, Infinite is a bold science fiction novel exploring the vastness of space and a man’s desire to exist, find love, and alter the course of his life.
more
A very original take on the concept of immortality and the implications therein. Jeremy Robinson is a great storyteller. I couldn’t put it down.
Read for 2021 SPSFC
Overall Thoughts
It took a bit to get past the blood, guts, and sort of sophomoric humor of the first section, but the description and pacing of this book is engaging. I was sucked in for most of the story, but—without spoiling things—there are just one too many twists in this, which ended up taking away my satisfaction in the story. There’s a lot to love in the philosophical concepts and action of this book, but overall it just feels too long. There is a very obvious endpoint, and then the story keeps going for more than ten chapters after that. And then there’s another ending. And another. Each one lessened my enjoyment just a bit. I almost wish this was two books, but having gotten to the final twist, I can see why it wasn’t. So overall, very engaging characters and storyline, but it didn’t completely gel for me.
Setting
Most of this book takes place in the fairly non-descript corridors of a generational ship. There is a little information about the origins of the flight to repopulate Earth, and where the crewmembers came from. Most of this book is about the character’s mental journeys. There are some more places near the end that are pretty cool, but this story largely focuses on people.
Character
William Chanokh is the main character in this story, and the other big roles are a short-lived villain, a woman in cryosleep, and a female presenting A.I. Several sections are carried solely by one character, which is quite a task for a novel. Much of the dialogue consists of the thoughts and mental narration of William, and only later in the story do other characters really get speaking roles. While this does a good job of building William’s character up, it also makes the first third of this book a bit slow to get going. Unfortunately, one of the twists negates much of the emotional progress between characters, so I found at the end I actually had more trouble connecting than I did in the middle of the story.
Plot
This is the main problem area for me. The author is definitely a competent writer and the prose is engaging, but there were so many twists and turns thrown during the novel I had trouble engaging with the overall plot. There is a main objective in the first half of the book, which the reader thinks is overcome, but again, one of the twists near the very end negates all this progress. I really liked the individual mini-plots in this book, and I think I would have really liked it, had the book just ended after what I thought was the first “ending,” about two-thirds of the way through the book. I was then similarly satisfied, once I had gotten into the second part of this book, but once again, that ending was subverted. I was satisfied with how the book was going until the very last chapter or so, but I have almost never had my emotion changed so quickly from satisfaction to “meh” at the end of a story.
Score out of 10 (My personal score, not the final contest score)
Temporary score until more books in the contest are read: Good prose, interesting characters, some problems with the plot. 6/10.
Infinite is easily Robinson’s most mind-bending work yet. With his masterful as always story telling, he introduces concepts that lead you to question everything about… well, everything. Admittedly written during times when he was going through some pretty intense drama in his real life, Robinson turns his own questions into one of his all around best works yet. While other Robinson works have had better focus on action and adventure, and there is still plenty of that here (including an opening scene of our protagonist being repeatedly killed), this book uses the action to set the space (literally) for the questions to be explored. And this, to my mind, is what contributes to it being all the stronger for it. There is still the great deal of escapism that we have come to expect from Robinson, yet there is also the much deeper questioning, should we decide to go there in our own heads.
And the ending… well, that might be the single most mind bending part of the entire story.
I was drawn to the promise of a character who had seemingly infinite lives trying to find out why his friend went mad and killed nearly the entire crew while also trying to gain control of a ship hurtling through space at faster than light speed. What the book delivered didn’t live up to the promise.
The main character essentially spent the first 60% of the book battling rogue AIs, which I found of little interest. Early on, it became obvious what the source of the MC’s predicament was. I ended up being close to correct and I’m not good at predicting story outcomes.
Somewhere around chapter 33 (of 50), the story appeared to take a turn for something that was very interesting to me. At the time, it seemed like an exciting twist, but by the end it was clear why it wasn’t a plausible route for the story. However, after about 5 chapters that path was unfortunately abandoned, and we were back to the parade of scenarios that led to more fighting scenes.
This was a weak story that seemed to lean heavily on fight scenes, which is never a reason I choose a book. Disappointing.
Ugh. I truly love Jeremy Robinson’s body of work as a whole. I do, honestly I do.
But Infinite is so far off the mark I can’t stomach it anymore. I peeked at some of the spoilers here, and it seems I was right on the money for how it’s going to end. RC Bray is doing a great job of narrating, but it’s so predictable, derivative, and juvenile in its dude-stuck-in-space-creates-fantasy-woman theme, I don’t want to know any more.