Friday 2 December 2005

Pic of the day: Paperback version of Startide Rising, by David Brin. Found it at the used book store where I have handed in dozens and dozens of book these last couple weeks. There were lots of used books, but only a couple of them did I find worthy.

"Startide Rising"

This is the second Uplift novel I have read. The previous one, Brightness Reef, made a lasting impression on me even though it is 7 years since I read it. Pretty exactly 7 years, since I mention it in my 7 years ago entry!

I love these novels because the aliens are so alien. Nowhere in these two books does he describe any alien species fully, although there is some exposition in Brightness Reef. But there they were sharing a colony with human refugees, so the species mingled a lot. In Startide Rising the aliens are mostly just a remote menace, and we only get short glimpses of them.

Brin's aliens are nothing like E.T. or Starman or the Greys. Most of them are oxygen breathers, in so far as it is even mentioned, but the number of arms, legs, heads etc varies considerably. In this book there are casual references to such things as "mating claws" or "rings" and you can guess from context what they may be, but it is all handled as if it was taken for granted and of little consequence. Which is true enough. Once a species has particle weapons and kinetic shields, it doesn't much matter how many legs they have.

But the aliens are not just weird looking. They also tend to be religious, in a bad sense of the word. The tradition of uplift - a species genetically improving lesser species to make them sentient - supposedly started with the near-mythical Progenitors a couple billion years ago. The various sentient species tend to fall into one of a few distinct views on who these Progenitors were and what they wanted to achieve by initiating the uplift sequence. Depending on this, they form factions that are essentially religious in nature, and fight bitterly against each other. Apart from that, however, their thought processes are often beyond the pale. It is pretty obvious for instance that family relationships are different if your mommy ate your daddy on the wedding night, or if you and a hundred of more siblings were left alone to eat each other until you grew up enough to be ready for sentience.

I would have liked to see more of the aliens, but in this case the book was mostly about intelligent dolphins (uplifted by humans) and one chimp (same) and a few humans. A spaceship piloted mostly by dolphins is stranded on a planet where they are just barely able to survive, while various hostile aliens are fighting about the right to capture them and their relics of what just may be the fabled Progenitors.

Even without eyestalks, however, Brin is a decent writer. He makes tension occur naturally and the books benefit from the casualness with which he approaches unfamiliar things, as if expecting the reader to know most of it already. It is a refreshing change from some recent science fiction books that read as if their authors had originally written articles for Scientific American and then, when refused, rewrote them into novels. I hate that. Science fact is great, but science fiction is different. SF is all about magnifying what we already know but are unable to see, so that it becomes clear. What is important is not how a hyperdrive is constructed - we'll see it when it happens - but what this kind of future reveals about human nature.

Brin has understood that. And that's why I enjoy his book and recommend it.