Startide Rising

Author: David Brin

Brin's second novel in the Uplift Saga is set in a future universe where no species can become sentient without being "uplifted" by a patron race. Humanity wouldn't be humanity without its existence being a mystery, so naturally, it's still unsolved as to who uplifted mankind. In turn, mankind has uplifted chimps and dolphins to sentience. The Terran exploration vessel Streaker (crewed and captained by mostly dolphins) crashes on a previously uncharted water planet called Kithrup after discovering an ancient and powerful secret that everyone wants a piece of. The action in this novel is fast paced, the hostiles in space and their epic space battles make for a gripping story, and it sure is imaginative. One of the topics that practically every space opera has to deal with is our encounter with aliens. After all, space opera assumes that we go out into the big wide universe, and at some point we are likely to meet up with something that is not human. But what will that encounter be like? Many space operas, particularly early examples, have tended to assume a fairly simple relationship: the aliens will either be enemies, or allies against another alien enemy. But the reality of such an encounter is likely to be far more complex than that. One very interesting possibility appears in David Brin's Uplift sequence: galactic civilisations sponsor and mentor intelligent races beginning to struggle up into space. In this universe, humans are an anomaly, since they don't have any sponsors, they have made the ascent into space under their own efforts, though they have in turn uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees. Nevertheless, humanity is the newest and weakest of the galactic civilisations, which is a dangerous position to be in. Then, in Startide Rising, not quite the first but one of the best of the sequence, a human ship happens upon a cluster of derelict spaceships that might belong to the legendary Progenitors, and the discovery unleashes rivalries and conflicts between the other civilisations. Why It Made the List Startide Rising won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. With the other novels in the Uplift Sequence (Sundiver, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore and Heaven's Reach) it provides a fascinatingly different perspective on our place in the universe. DOLPHINS IN SPACE! I promise I am not making this up, as much as it sounds like a bad take-off from the Muppets, it really happens in this novel. And not just dolphins in space, but actual dolphin-fucking. Yep, you have to read it to believe it. And usually I'd leave the awards a novel has won to the end of a review, but I feel after the dolphin fucking comment, that the industry seal of approval needs to be shown upfront, for fear of turning readers away. Startide Rising won the 1984 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards. That's some pretty serious sci-fi literature swag there.