A good way to illustrate the utter failure of the Star Wars prequels on just about every level of storytelling imaginable is to ask someone to describe the characters without talking about their jobs or their costumes. [Come on, try it: Queen Amidala. Oh, she looks like a Kabuki... wait, no. She's the queen... I'm sorry. Um, her hair. She's... normal?] The characters in Startide Rising suffer in much the same fashion. Aside from the fact that they are of different species, not much differentiates the crew-members: human, dolphin, scientist, dolphin scientist. Chimpanzee. This is an issue, considering the book is told in alternating point-of-view chapters from a dozen or so different characters of several species.You are probably confused already. How can you write a book where some characters are dolphins and some characters are human and you can't really tell them apart? Well, if David Brin is any kind of example, you write it rather poorly, and then you win every major genre award for it. I should totally try!Once again, I am being an ass. This is one of those sci-fi books, the ones where you remember why a lot of people hold their noses when they walk by the genre shelves in Barnes & Noble [note: insert funny joke about fat & unshowered nerds here later (Comic Book Guy reference?)]. It has some really cool, intriguing ideas driving the narrative. It also has a cyborg dolphin on the cover. And it is really rough to read on a sentence-by-sentence level: loaded with tiresome exposition, clumsy world-building, absolutely atrocious dialogue, juvenile sexual content.So, then, I simultaneously really didn't like reading it and enjoyed the heck out of it. The premise is certainly audacious -- in Galactic history, no race has ever achieved sentience and spaceflight without being "uplifted" by a patron race... except for humans, who even managed to perform a few uplifts of their own, creating super-intelligent dolphins to... pilot their... spaceships. For some reason.Even though being a dolphin doesn't seem to change how a character thinks in comparison to a human, Brin still puts a lot of effort into developing their society. Like everything else about this book, I am of two minds about this element: I respect the lengths Brin goes to, and yet I find his choices incredibly silly and annoying. For example, the dolphins have been genetically modified to speak English screw it, I don't care Anglic, but the language gives them pause, so they stutter. So all their dialogue has extra consonants. Which is still preferable to their native tongue, Trinany, which is, obviously, Flipper-type screeches, which it turns out are actually, when translated, quite poetic and haiku-like. There are a bunch of humans who can speak Trinary too, and I am really glad they never made this into the movie that was planned in the '80s, because it would be even more ridiculous if I had to see it rather than just roll my eyes as I read about it.One thing I did appreciate was the surprisingly limited scope of the story; despite the length, the plot is this: ship is damaged in a firefight, ship crashes on a waterworld (thank goodness!) and must be repaired, and any escape must avoid the now-warring factions of the various pursuers that are hanging out in orbit. I liked it mostly because it resulted in a 100-page climactic action/escape sequence that managed to be the most interesting part of the book. I did not it because it also provided lots of pages for narrative dead ends and dolphin sex scenes, which aren't the selling point you might imagine. At least, not for me.
This is a book that could only have come from that special chunk of weirdness that we collectively call the 1980s. Only in this era was there the necessary mixture of Utopian dreams, crystal-wearing self help-addicted Gaia worshipers, and rampant amphetamine abuse to make a story about genetically uplifted dolphins piloting spaceships through the galaxy sound like a good idea. Mind you, this is the same decade that brought us Spock swimming with humpback whales in an attempt to preserve life on Earth, so it's not as though David Brin was breaking new ground with his second tale set in the Uplift universe.Set 200 years after the events in Sundiver, the first book in the series, humankind has continued with their genetic tinkering with the DNA of both dolphins and chimpanzees and the cetaceans are beginning to step out from their accepted role as one of humanity's client species and starting to create some amount of self determinism for their kind. The first step in this comes with the Streaker, the first completely dolphin-crewed space vessel that sets out on a test run to observe the stresses of command on both ship and cetacean. Unfortunately, what the crew had not banked on was discovering a derelict fleet of ships in a backwater section of the galaxy that may or may not belong to the long-fabled Progenitors, the race of aliens that originally set forth from their homeworld to seed intelligence throughout the stars and setting the model of Uplift and indentured servitude by which the galaxy continues to run to this day. Pursued by fleets of fundamentalist extraterrestrials all seeking to claim the Earthling's prize as their own, the Streaker finds itself battered and blasted, necessitating a need to take shelter on an isolated water world far from home. As the dolphins and their minimal human crew hide from the ETs fighting a long and pointless battle in space above them, the crew is put through stress levels the likes of which they were not designed to withstand on a planet that is far more than it seems.Brin does an admirable job tying together the disparate plot threads- teasing out the mystery of the water world and fleshing out his Delphine characters to the point that they seem incredibly human (albeit humans that use echolocation as a primary tool for viewing their interactions with the world). Some plot threads are left hanging, characters are introduced and then killed with no purpose that I can see other than to flesh out the page count, and some major problems are resolved off-stage in very anti-climactic asides, but on the whole this novel hangs together far better than its predecessor and it's easy to see why Startide Rising snagged both the Hugo and Nebula awards the year it was released. Still, space opera is a hard thing for me to enjoy as fully as I once was. These days it's dystopian visions of science run amok or humans seeking their own obliteration that pepper most pages that I read, fitting with the general atmosphere of end-times dolor that informs so much of our society in these tumultuous times, but it's certainly interesting to return to the sort of sci-fi that I used to read with a religious reverence and see how I react to it once the optimistic gleam of youth has been worn off a little. I will certainly be seeing this series through to its end.
What do You think about Startide Rising (1984)?
3.5 stars. A science fiction classic that doesn't quite live up to the title of masterpiece. The concept of "uplifting" and the manner in which David Brin incorporates it into the universe he has created in these novels is brilliant and definitely worth checking out. Writing is just okay. Still, great world-building, fascinating aliens and a pretty good plot. Not Brin's best but worth reading, Recommended!!Winner: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1984)Winner: Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1984)Winner: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (1984)Named to Locus "All Time" Poll for Best Science Fiction Novel (#16)
—Stephen
Good Lord. Why did I hate this so much? Even I don't know. Talking dolphins; space opera; strange planets and a cool intergalactic hierarchy of "master" races "uplifting" their lessers. Ostensibly these are all good ideas. I guess I just hated that every character seemed to have one voice, and that voice was Obnoxious.My Hugo-Nebula mission meets its first major challenge. But then, life's too short for asshole dolphins. I put the book down about 2/3 into it. If I want underwater spec fic, that one TV show with Roy Schneider will just have to do.
—Angela
When a book starts with a glossary of characters and terms you know you're in for a challenge to keep track of everybody. This second book in the uplift saga is much like the first in that it starts slowly but builds to an exciting conclusion. Although this book is ostensibly a sequel to Sundiver, it has very little to do with the story. It is set in the same universe, and two of the characters refer in passing to characters and occurrences in the previous story, but other than that it stands on its own.The things I didn't like about this book were the same I didn't like about the first. The story starts slow and makes references as if you were supposed to understand the whole picture before reading the book, and the end brings up more questions than it resolves.I really do like the themes David Brin explores regarding equality of races and stuff, and I found the resolution interesting, I just wish he had included a few more chapters to show what the resolution really was.I'll reserve judgment until I finish the series, but if the last book in the trilogy doesn't come back to some of these unresolved situations I'll be disappointed.
—Tim
