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