1988 Hugo and Locus - THE UPLIFT WAR by David Brin

A sequel of sorts to Startide Rising, The Uplift War continues the story of Earthlings under siege in a galaxy of ancient, hierarchical aliens.

In Startide Rising we learned about a dolphin-crewed ship under attack after a major discovery. Here, we see the Earth-leased colony of Garth under siege by a group of bird aliens called the Gubru who want to hold the planet hostage to exhange for the dolphins' information. The central story is more-or-less that simple, but there are several intertwining subplots that Brin juggles throughout. Garth is a planet with a large neo-chimpanzee population, and we learn about the intricacies of chimp uplift, including the controversial eugenics program enforced against them. We see the development of a guerilla resistance (or gorilla resistance - ha!). We watch the complex triumvirate marriage that leads the Gubru, and we finally get to meet the prankster Tymbini, humanity's closest allies. We also discover information about the mysterious Garthlings on the ecologically devastated world - and it's here that Brin presents his best twists, especially after I initially feared that he was repeating a subplot from the previous Uplift novel. Brin also works to add more romance this time around, and we get two love triangles: one chimp, and one human/alien.

It's a very fun novel that works on a lot of the same levels as Startide Rising (one of my favorite Hugo winners so far). It's well-written and thoughtful. There's some solid speculative science, nice details and highly likable characters. And, it's fast-paced and action-packed. It also shares a lot of the earlier novel's flaws - a reliance on contrivance and deus ex machina to resolve all plot issues being the worst - and those flaws felt magnified here for a few reasons. This is the third Uplift novel, and my willingness to ignore the issues diminishes each go around - not to mention that I found neo-chimp culture far less interesting than neo-doplhin culture. And, this novel is two hundred pages longer. It feels appropriately epic for it's 600+ page length, but it doesn't feel more epic than the shorter Startide Rising...

I'd still give the Uplift books a big thumbs up overall, but if you only want to read one (and I do think they would work okay independently), I'd recommend the second. When I finish this award-winning novel project, I think the second set of Uplift books (which struck out at the awards) will be high on my "to read" list.

Grade: A-

1986 Locus and Campbell – THE POSTMAN by David Brin

I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s lyrical post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road for a book club. I think it’s going to be hard for me to read other post-apocalyptic novels after that one. I have read many of them before, including about half-a-dozen so far for this blog. As the Cold War winds down, however, they get fewer and farther between.

The novel takes place in the far-off year 2011, after waves of warfare and social destruction have wrapped around the globe following a world war that began in 1995. There were nuclear weapons, plagues, and fascistic militias. Gordon Krantz has spent much of the last sixteen years wandering across the mountain west, playing scenes from Shakespeare for food. When he discovers an old postal truck, complete with a uniform-wearing postal worker corpse, he decides that he can earn his room and board easier by delivering mail. This starts out as a cynical ploy, but he soon begins to weave a fantasy of a restored United States with a working Post Office in an attempt to unite the survivors of Oregon against a new militia attack. The messages are clear and simplistic – fascistic militias are bad, small town democracy (and America!) is good. It’s not that I disagree with these messages, but I don’t think they’re particularly interesting (though the view that a central state with strong institutions might be a good thing seems to get rarer every day). There are some more interesting ideas about the ethics of propagandistic lies, but this thread gets lost in a mélange of subplots and a manufactured action sequence that takes up the last quarter of the novel.

Actually, there are a lot of subplots here, and the novel’s biggest problem is probably how poorly they mesh. The first half is a merging of multiple novellas, and the plot does jerk through different episodes. The sub-plots also tend to really stretch the old suspension of disbelief. One involves a supercomputer* and the other a group of crazy neo-feminists. I’ve complained a lot lately about the lack of good female characters, and this novel is not an improvement: we have a comely and willing young married woman who sleeps with Gordon, and another comely-but-crazy, young neo-feminist who loves Gordon. That’s about the sum total of their characters.

I haven’t seen the Kevin Costner-starring film adaptation, which was a box office and critical failure (though I have some friends who like it), but I can see why the film might not work. The novel is a bit too transparent and sentimental in its patriotism and political messages, and it doesn't have the most cohesive plot.

*Brin wins an award for bad futurism here. He puts humans on Mars and gives them sentient AIs before the collapse…in 1995. Normally, I just let bad futurism pass with, at most, a sarcastic remark, but considering that one of the themes of the book is the problem-solving wonder of technology, it’s a tad more significant here.

Grade: B-

1984 Hugo and Locus, 1983 Nebula - STARTIDE RISING by David Brin

This is the sort of novel that inspired me to do this project: I’ve always wanted to read the Uplift novels, but I’d never gotten around to them because so many other books took precedence. This project has forced me to read them, and I have to report that I am very glad I did.

The setting is a space opera universe where humanity has encountered an ancient Galactic Civilization full of different alien races with a clear hierarchy between them. Every known species was granted sentience through instruction and genetic manipulation – the process called “uplift” – by another species (except, of course, the original, mythical Progenitors). The oldest species that have uplifted more aliens have high status, and their “client” species also share some of that status. The thing is, no one knows who uplifted humanity…which would mean that they would have very low status as an abandoned, or “wolfling” race, except for the possibility that they are the first species since the Progenitors to uplift themselves.

The first Uplift novel is a book called Sundiver, basically a murder mystery set on a solar expedition with a cast of humans and odd aliens as the suspects. I wouldn’t say it’s necessary to read Sundiver first, but it was a fun novel and a good introduction to the world of Uplift. The mystery does get a little byzantine by the end (there are several false resolutions and a very over-the-top climax), and I’d have to say that Startide Rising is the better constructed novel all around, which is probably why it racked up the awards and Sundiver did not.

Before they encountered aliens, humanity had begun to uplift a couple of species itself – both chimpanzees and dolphins have been taught (and genetically engineered) to reason, build, and speak English. Startide Rising follows the crew of the first dolphin starship, which makes a startling discovery that draws the wrath of several traditionalist aliens. As much as you want the fun and plucky dolphins to kick ass and save the galaxy, it turns out that they are in over the heads in several different respects. Their damaged ship, the Streaker, hides out on the water planet of Kithrup while the crew fights amongst istelf and aliens fight over them in the skies. Brin manages to play the tension of the situation very well, and he’s created a very convincing culture for dolphins, including a set of religious beliefs that stretch back to before they were uplifted. The characters are great, the novel moves at a fast-paced, and there’s an action sequence at the end that’s as exciting as any I’ve read in space opera.

My only complaint is that Brin seems to have a tendency to write moustache-twirling villains. His hateful aliens make sense, and they actually occupy a fairly believable and unique niche among sf aliens: they don’t want to help us be better people, and they don’t want to eat us or steal are water, they just don’t give a damn about us. So, the super-evil aliens I’ll accept, but there are actually some members of the crew who are just really dastardly. Some of them get fleshed out more by the end, but some remain two dimensional baddies throughout.

That complaint aside, I loved this book. Highly recommended.

Grade: A