Retrieve Startide Rising Penned By David Brin Presented As File
A science fiction classic that doesn't quite live up to the title of masterpiece, The concept of "uplifting" and the manner in which David Brin incorporates it into the universe he has created in these novels is brilliant and definitely worth checking out.
Writing is just okay. Still, great worldbuilding, fascinating aliens and a pretty good plot, Not Brin's best but worth reading, Recommended!!
Winner: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Winner: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Winner: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Named to Locus "All Time" Poll for Best Science Fiction NovelI don't know how to rate it,or.
It's more.but I'll give an extra,for the dolphins.
It has everything I want from adventure cool action scenes included, compelling characters, very fascinating world building, And the setting itself, makes it a winner, I need to read more Uplift stuff! One of the most interesting ideas in this second part of the series is the evolution of language, the forming of its complex meaning and how culture defines how the habitat is perceived and described.
And dolphins rock.
Some thoughts about the evolution of language and different ways to communicate:
Humans adapted to many environments with special words, cults and worshipping standing out elements of nature.
Animals may develop similar attitudes and the difference between a conscious ant and a sensible reptile are immense,
In the case of animals without organs of speech, mimic and gesture may develop to the complexity of a language in combination with the quick chameleon and octopus colour changes.
Even that may not be necessary if statebuilding insects develop more and more complex hormone and smell controlling abilities that go so far to be used in conversations between intelligent individuals of a state.
Take biology, any kind of communication process and just mix it with evolution, genetic engineering and a bit if technical integration and so many ways to babble trivia can be imagined.
Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
sitelink org/pmwiki/pmwiki. ph
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Everything that was wrong with the series first, Sundiver, is still present here, albeit diminished.
Everything that was good with the predecessor is still here in Startide Rising, albeit amplified,
There's still a problem with a too much going on, b too many farfuture, newfangled contraptions and abilities, c cartoonlike creatures, and d difficulty making all the components fit.
Some of the ideas here many carried over from the first, are just so good! a Uplift, The whole politics surrounding it is teeming with implications, It was worth reading the book just to dabble with the possibilities there, b The Progenitors. Here Brin approaches Arthur C, Clarke territory in wonder. c Humanity. It was so much fun belonging to the human race and reading this book, We're far from perfect, but Brin shows us we can be proud, d The Library. The value of received wisdom is a great philosophical notion scattered through all the aforementioned, Brin doesn't approach this or contend with it in any deepsense, but it fit perfectly into his universe and was highly entertaining,
Brin had more control over the story and the components this time, but it was still something of a jumble, If anyone values coherence, continuity, or order, this is going to be a challenging book, From what I've read so far, I'm never going to love the Uplift Saga, but if it continues like this, I'm going to find a lot to like in it.
This book started a bit slow for me, It took me a bit of time to get used to Dolphins operating a spaceship, I skipped the first in the series because this book, the second in the series, is on the list of best scifi books ever of that the members of SciFi Aficionados GR group have identified.
I've been slowly working my way through that list, It worked well as a standalone for me, Loose ends were not left hanging yes, there are some things that weren't resolved but there was no cliffhanger,
The dolphins are a species that is being raised up by homo sapiens, They are the second species on earth that the homo sapiens have raised up, The first species were the chimpanzee, Each species in the five galaxies has been raised up by a more accomplished species and legend is that at some point in the very distance past there was a progenitor species that started it.
The strange thing is that no one knows who raised up the homo sapiens,
Getting back to the space ship, it is a survey ship that seems to have discovered a fleet of very old spaceships and a skeleton.
When the ship reported to the Terrain government about its find, it was ordered to run because when it sent the message to Earth, all the species in the galaxies heard it and will be coming after the survey ship.
And sure enough, come they did, The survey ship managed to escape but it was damaged, It is in hiding underwater on a planet about which nothing new appears in the ship's mini library since a few millennium ago.
Repairs are being made as fast as possible because the other species in the galaxies have gathered around the planet and are engaged in battling each other because they all want to know the location of the fleet of old spaceships.
While looking for materials needed to make repairs, members of the crew are saved by a new species that appears to be at the cusp of sentience.
On the survey ship are six humans and one chip in addition to theremaining dolphins, Two of the humans seem to have been test tube creations, They are partners Jillian and Tom and speak many languages, including the three spoken by the dolphins and various versions of the Galactica language.
They also seem to have some degree of physic power, Most of the dolphins and the other humans love them and the dolphins believe that they are really the ones in charge, despite being told no.
Things get pretty dicey for everyone, Some of the new type of genetically manipulated dolphins that were snuck onto the ship by one of the humans he faked their test results go mad.
The executive officer leads a mutiny but gets thwarted, There are battles, murders, obsessed scientists, and other things going on, providing lots of action,
The narrator was good, although he seemed to be tired in the last quarter of the book and probably needed a break.
This is a book that could only have come from that special chunk of weirdness that we collectively call thes, Only in this era was there the necessary mixture of Utopian dreams, crystalwearing self helpaddicted Gaia worshipers, and rampant amphetamine abuse to make a story about genetically uplifted dolphins piloting spaceships through the galaxy sound like a good idea.
Mind you, this is the same decade that brought us Spock swimming with humpback whales in an attempt to preserve life on Earth, so it's not as though David Brin was breaking new ground with his second tale set in the Uplift universe.
Setyears after the events in Sundiver, the first book in the series, humankind has continued with their genetic tinkering with the DNA of both dolphins and chimpanzees and the cetaceans are beginning to step out from their accepted role as one of humanity's client species and starting to create some amount of self determinism for their kind.
The first step in this comes with the Streaker, the first completely dolphincrewed space vessel that sets out on a test run to observe the stresses of command on both ship and cetacean.
Unfortunately, what the crew had not banked on was discovering a derelict fleet of ships in a backwater section of the galaxy that may or may not belong to the longfabled Progenitors, the race of aliens that originally set forth from their homeworld to seed intelligence throughout the and setting the model of Uplift and indentured servitude by which the galaxy continues to run to this day.
Pursued by fleets of fundamentalist extraterrestrials all seeking to claim the Earthling's prize as their own, the Streaker finds itself battered and blasted, necessitating a need to take shelter on an isolated water world far from home.
As the dolphins and their minimal human crew hide from the ETs fighting a long and pointless battle in space above them, the crew is put through stress levels the likes of which they were not designed to withstand on a planet that is far more than it seems.
Brin does an admirable job tying together the disparate plot threads teasing out the mystery of the water world and fleshing out his Delphine characters to the point that they seem incredibly human albeit humans that use echolocation as a primary tool for viewing their interactions with the world.
Some plot threads are left hanging, characters are introduced and then killed with no purpose that I can see other than to flesh out the page count, and some major problems are resolved offstage in very anticlimactic asides, but on the whole this novel hangs together far better than its predecessor and it's easy to see why Startide Rising snagged both the Hugo and Nebula awards the year it was released.
Still, space opera is a hard thing for me to enjoy as fully as I once was, These days it's dystopian visions of science run amok or humans seeking their own obliteration that pepper most pages that I read, fitting with the general atmosphere of endtimes dolor that informs so much of our society in these tumultuous times, but it's certainly interesting to return to the sort of scifi that I used to read with a religious reverence and see how I react to it once the optimistic gleam of youth has been worn off a little.
I will certainly be seeing this series through to its
end, .