I’m always looking for media featuring aliens, especially multiple races. Came across this on TvTropes. Seems to dismiss the first book and say its unneeded. Anyone here enjoy/hate this one? Any starting point you’d recommend? Most importantly how prominent are the aliens?
I really enjoy this series. While a lot of the focus is on the humans and their uplifts, there are plenty of interesting and unique alien races. I’d read them in the order listed here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe
Read one, wasn’t bad. My main objection is that the Uplifted species are too humanish. If I read what a character was thinking, there wasn’t a lot of difference between the chimps and the dolphins.
I’d suggest Poul Anderson for old school ‘Star Trek’ vibes. “War Of The Wingmen” and “Trader To The Stars” feature a much smarter version of Harry Mudd, a human merchant who wheels and deals with all sorts of aliens.
Adrian Tchaikovsky “Children Of Time” posits a future where a tiny handful of Earth ships have gone out to try and terraform various exoplanets. These uplifted species are way, way different from the humans and each other.
Don’t read Children of Time if you’re arachnophobic. Or do, and face your fears.
You should have marked that ‘Spoilers.’
It’s not a spoiler, it’s on the back of the book.
Look at Mr. Fancypants with his lah-di-dah book jackets!
One of my favorites!
All 3 books in the first uplift series work fine as stand-alone stories. But book 1 (Sundiver) does kinda read like a prequel to the rest of the series. The inciting incident of Startide Rising is what sets everything else in motion for all subsequent books, and Sundiver takes place before that. But it does have a bunch of world building that is helpful context for the other books (and is still a fun story).
I recommend you read Startide Rising first, then circle back to Sundiver if you are enjoying the world and the author’s style.
I read them all. I think I liked the first book fine, it’s more of a self-contained mystery, which might be better. The aliens are probably most prominent in the second trillogy; there’s loads of them and I quite like the Commons of Jijo.
I feel like the series is sort of missing pieces? Like, across the five books it is in, WTF was going on with Streaker’s discovery is never really explained, the whole the-galactics-aren’t-being-honest-with-us thread is never satisfyingly resolved in the whole series, and at several points in the chronology it feels like there could have been a whole book about the stuff that happened since the last book.
The whole series is An Aesop on how science is good. Which is fine, doing science is good and you can spend a series reminding people of that if you would like. But it’s strange to find that as the point of a series that otherwise seems to have all these frankly conservative ideas about colonizing space planets and about some people being just inherently more or less “uplifted” than others. Uplift seems to stand in for a person’s moral value without what I would consider sufficient critique. Like, paternalism is bad when the galactics do it, but when humans just have full power over a dolphin person’s entire life that’s fine somehow, you need it to do Uplift, the thing the books are about. The whole Uplift concept has unavoidable parallels to European notions of “civilizing” people by using military force to make them act more like Europeans, which I don’t think are fully examined.
I also remember them as having weird 1980s gender ideas in them, like the men are normal and the women are viewed through some weird filter and the other gender humans are entirely absent.
I think there are more interesting books to read about the structure of minds and the diversity of subjective experience. For example, Diaspora only comes out a year after Heaven’s Reach, and also has all sorts of weird aliens, but it additionally has defensible gender politics and a much more cogent thesis on autonomy and what the powers of science may or must be used to do. Or, A Half-Built Garden is all about what happens when galactic society arrives to save the humans, and the humans maybe finally don’t need saving.
Some really interesting ideas in that Diaspora except, reminds me of a lot of the ideas you can find in the indie scifi scene right now. I’ll definitely check it out!
They’re great! Especially Sundiver and The Uplift War. EDIT: should have added they are somewhat stand-alone, although you do manage to learn a little bit more about the overall arc of the plot from each book if you move through them in order.
Startide Rising is really good. The only Brin book I like better is The Postman.
Startide Rising, is that the one where they dive into the surface of the sun and think that they find life forms?
That’s Sundiver. Startide Rising is the sequel.
Oooh. Thanks. I don’t think I read that one then.
It’s quite good. If you’re looking specifically for aliens, you’ll enjoy the second trilogy (Brightness Reef, Heaven’s Reach, Infinity’s Shore) which is set on a planet where members of various species are attempting to live together outside the structure of galactic society.
I like Sundiver even though it isn’t very much like the rest of the series. I’d say check it out, and if it doesn’t grab you just move on to Startide Rising. Skipping straight to Brightness Reef will also work.
Honestly might just jump to Reef based on that! I’ll do some more research first.
Startide does give some context to make some of Reef’s anomalies more interesting earlier than Reef by itself would reveal. (Don’t want to say more to avoid spoilers.)
Haven’t read the book but I have a book of the cover artwork artist!
Teenage me jacked it to this book a lot. I mean c’mon.
The Uplift series isn’t really that third picture but I can kind of see why this person did the cover art.
The last one actually reminds me of Saturn’s Children where the cover is like a worse CGI version of that, but the book actually thinks it through in a way that makes this person a compelling point of view character.
Haven’t read it but if you like multiple races, etc might I suggest the final architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky?
Might be right up your alley
I’ll check it out! Thanks
This is a tangent but I really enjoyed Changing Planes. It’s a collection of short stories. Each one covers a different world with different aliens.
I’ll check it out! Best outcome of this thread is all the alien books I now have to check out.
Liked Sundiver, managed to get through Startide Rising, really enjoyed Uplift War. Couldn’t get through the next book.
I have read it at least twice, because I love the idea of Apes and Dolphins in space!
Read the whole series its worth the context and wont leave you with any gaps.
Startide Rising is the best of them all.
Sundiver is quite good too.
The later books were deeply marred by Brin’s giving into pressure from his editors to centre them on a group of adolescent males of diverse species because his publisher was of the view that the average scientific fiction reader was a 14 year old male. Brin has written about this and how difficult it was for him to write outside his natural quite adult style. His fantastic characters from Startide Rising are pushed into the background and only get to step forward and shine again at the very end.
I tried starting Sundiver twice and couldn’t get into it. Uplifting is not particularly interesting to me though. It is the “look ma’, aliens” loophole IMO. I don’t know of a compelling reason for that kind of bioengineering. I think the future is biotech.
The process of uplifting is more or less for the purpose of indentured servitude.
A bit like the epsilons in Brave New World- provides a species smart enough to be useful, but dumb enough they don’t rebel.
I vaguely recall them getting consecutively better. Not that Sundiver was bad, just the later books were better. It was sometime ago, so I don’t remember a whole lot of story beats, just spaceships piloted by dolphins hiding under water, and intelligent chimps talking about their weird sex rituals. I tore through them pretty quickly and never really considered a re-read.
