The Uplift War by David Brin

Sequel to Startide Rising

I couldn’t remember much about this novel before I re-read it. I had remembered a fair amount about Startide Rising, but The Uplift War just didn’t stick with me. I remembered the Uplifted chimpanzees and some of the aliens, but really very little about the story.

 

I don’t know what took me so long to read this book. It first showed up on my reading list for July! Somehow, it just wasn’t as engaging as Startide Rising, but I’ll be darned if I can put my finger on exactly why. Perhaps I should just chalk it up as a victim to my distractibility.

Anyway, while this is a follow-up to Startide Rising and the conflicts are a consequence of the events of that novel, we are introduced to a new group of characters with a different set of problems. They know little of the fate of the crew of Streaker and little about why they caused such a problem with the rest of the citizens of the known universe in the first place. The magnitude of those new protagonists’ challenges, however, is as big as can be expected from a well-crafted science fiction setting.

Humanity continues to be full of surprises as do the earth species they continue to genetically modify with a goal of reaching a high level of intelligence. It’s the resilience of this so-called “wolfling” race that makes the earth continue to matter in such a big universe. And why humans and earth should matter is something important that we explore by writing and reading science fiction. Brin’s optimistic view of our place in an infinity of space and time and the complexity of the themes of evolution (aided or otherwise), civilization and society, and planetary stewardship make The Uplift War thought provoking as well as highly entertaining.

There is just one area in which I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. As humans are improving themselves in this future universe, they are developing psychic powers, one of the very few speculative items in the book not extrapolated from any documented science. I wonder why authors do this, since is seems to me like adding a fantasy component to an otherwise “hard-science fiction” novel. Perhaps like spaceships and faster-than-light travel and otherworldly neighbors it’s just something we wish we had but do not, something that would make future humans bigger and better than we are today. Personally, I’d settle for world peace as a human achievement over psychic powers, but I suppose that wouldn’t make for a very interesting science fiction story.

 

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

Wednesday Word

Sometimes a word I choose for (the occasional) Wednesday Word is one that shows up often in a book. Other times it’s a word that represents the essence of the book or some part of it. This week, I just picked a word that was unfamiliar to me, but still sounded kind of cool. Actually, the word in the form I found it in The Uplift War by David Brin wasn’t in my Webster’s New World Dictionary, so I give you the word that was as close as I could get.

 

The word in the novel: cinerescent

 

Close enough: cinereous (si nir’ ē əs) adj. 1. of or like ashes  2. the color of ashes; ash-gray

  

Do you ever feel like authors are just showing off?

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel

I read this book just over a year and a half ago, so I wasn’t exactly digging up an old memory or trying to remember why I felt the way I did about it. I was re-reading it out of pure indulgence. I knew I loved this book and I knew why. And I knew I wanted to read it again.

Actually, I found myself at my local library, looking for something to read at a nearby park where I was planning to lounge, and trying not to succumb to the overwhelming Distraction of shelves upon shelves of books. I could check out The Library at Night again and read it again and it would fit into my reading plans just fine. Plus, it was particularly fun to read about libraries, some of them completely mad, while I was also reading The Name of the Rose.

I still adore the style, the quality and the premise of this book. It’s part history, part social and psychological commentary, part memoir, and it’s all about the places people have kept and read their books. Each person or group who collected volumes together in one place, whether to make them easily accessible to more readers or to protect and preserve them, must have first found books and writing valuable. The chronicle and celebration of that philosophy is skillfully done by Manguel in these relatively few pages that house so much information.

The Library at Night was published in 2006 when the internet had found a firm foothold but e-books and e-readers were just coming along. Manguel expresses some contempt for the internet and seems skeptical that digital archives would be an effective tool in preserving the written word. I admit to being among the many who didn’t think I could make the move to reading a screen rather than curling up with a paper book, but I also must admit that the quality of my experience with my e-reader has me coming around. This year, I read The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King and Cooked (Michael Pollan) on my e-reader before writing about them here. Other than requiring a bit of time to get used to using the digital bookmark and highlighting functions of my reader, I cannot say I really wished I could have been reading paper copies of these books instead.

E-reading may end up spelling the end of large, charming (and dusty and disorganized) shelves of books defining libraries. (Although, I suppose “collections” of antique books will always be of value.) Many things will definitely be lost if that is true, many things described in The Library at Night, but, as Manguel puts it in the chapter “The Library as Space,” “In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.” I, who have moved my library back and forth across the country a few times, would argue that mass is an issue as well. My e-reader, along with its protective case that also functions as an easel, is approximately 9 ¾ inches (24.5 centimeters) by 6 ¾ in (17.25 cm) by 7/8 in (2.25 cm) and has a mass of about 1 ¾ pounds (810 g). With our e-book collections, we have the potential to take our libraries with us wherever we go.

 

 

Coming soon: The Uplift War by David Brin (finally!)

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Translated from the Italian by William Weaver

The Name of the Rose is one of the most amazing (if not the most amazing) novels I’ve ever read. Having recently finished re-reading it, I have to say that my amazement has not waned in the least. This is a brilliantly intense book with so much detail, so much depth, and so much meaning, much of which, I must admit, is probably totally lost on me.

 

The story at the center of The Name of the Rose is ostensibly a murder mystery, but there’s so much going on in and around that story that it would be foolish to focus on that aspect of the novel alone. A 14^th century Benedictine abbey may seem like a limiting setting, small in area and potential and full of stodgy monks stewing in their own juices. The wealthy monastery that houses this entire novel, however, becomes so much more. It becomes the stew pot for the raging tumult in Europe during that time, which was rife with popes, bishops, heretics, inquisitors, and emperors and Eco has left none of them out of this complex story.

This novel is stuffed with and driven by a handful of colorful, fanatic, decent, and indecent characters, but in the center of them all is a most extraordinary, if inanimate, character: the Library. Yes, I feel like the dangerous labyrinth of jealously guarded books is a character in this story. It dominates the spirit of the abbey, seemingly torn between keeping itself hidden and indecipherable and bursting free of its deceptive and puzzling walls to share its knowledge with the learned world. It is the monastery’s point of pride, but also the source of its vices and, perhaps, its ultimate downfall.

Of course, Umberto Eco is a rare genius. I can’t even begin to describe the many layers of history, social commentary, cynicism, compassion, faith, doubt, fact, fiction, goodness, evil and terror that come alive in The Name of the Rose. I freely admit that I don’t even understand them all, but that doesn’t keep me from being both thoroughly entertained and provoked to deep thought.  It’s dangerous for me to read Eco. Not only is my perception of the world shifted at least a little bit each time I do, but I’m also tempted to do nothing but read and re-read…and read some more.

 

 

Coming soon: The Library at Night (again) by Alberto Manguel

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before

Favorite Lines Friday

Quoting The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel could go on forever. One would have to re-type the entire volume to share all the good bits. Here's a short quote from that book, however, for my current mood:

       Every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveler returned.



Coming soon: thoughts on re-reading The Library at Night and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco



A Year of Books I've Read Before

September Reading

Okay, so I’m not so good at finishing the books I assign myself each month. In fact, sometimes I’m not so good at starting those books. And so this month’s reading list is going to, as usual, have several hold-overs from last month.

Here’s what I hope to read in the month of September:

The Uplift War by David Brin. This is the third month that has included this novel on my reading list. I’m really having trouble getting through it. I’m hopeful that I’ll have some good reasons why that it so to discuss when I finally finish it…hopefully in September.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel, a book I read for the first time during A Year (Plus) of Books I Should Have Read By Now

 

 

A Year of Books I’ve Read Before