Startide Rising by David Brin
1984 Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award Winner (Review contains no spoilers)
The setting of this story is in the far future at a point where humanity has developed genetic engineering to the point where we have "uplifted" chimpanzees, and most recently dolphins, to human-like intelligence. Humanity has also expanded from the solar system and discovered that they are in fact in a very crowded galaxy of alien civilisations that are horrified to discover that humans apparently arose to intelligence on their own and weren't "uplifted" by a patron alien civilisation, as is traditional in the wider galaxy. By having uplifted two species of their own humanity is grudgingly given a ticket to independence amongst the civilisations by the galactic council rather than being indentured to a superior race, but a lot of fundamental traditionalist aliens aren't very cool with that.
Against all of that a prototype spaceship "Streaker", the first almost entirely crewed by dolphins and with only a handful of humans aboard, is sent out on a shakedown cruise and accidentally stumbles across a derelict armada that seems to be a remnant from the very first civilisation to develop intelligence, and on the trip back to Earth word of this discovery gets out and almost every civilisation in the galaxy starts hunting Streaker, so they can extract the location of the ghost fleet and claim it for themselves. Our story starts after Streaker is ambushed, and forced to flee and hide on a metal-rich waterworld for repairs.
This novel was absolutely fantastic from start to finish. As you may possibly be able to tell it is a bit of a space opera, with the weak and dumb humans almost at the bottom of the galactic food chain and hunted by everyone. There are a vast array of diverse characters, told from many of the character's own points of view at different times, alien, dolphin, computer, human, from underwater, from space, from the planet's liquid mantle. Such an amazingly detailed and realised setting, and absolutely none of it redundant. I could tell every step of the way that every bit of information we were being drip-fed was going to become a relevant plot point later on, but I continually failed at predicting most of the events.
The dolphins had their own multiple well-developed languages, each dolphin had its own clear and distinct personalities, religions, and I have no idea how the author managed to weave together so many complex agendas to make a single story. We were typically only given alien points of view from single examples of each species, but there was no shortage of those, and each was suitably alien yet understandable.
As far as sci-fi goes this is on the softer end, with advanced alien weaponry being of the universe probability altering or psychic sorts, as well as more mundane, so this is a more of an exciting adventure romp than say something like Ringworld. More Star Trek than The Expanse, but it managed to avoid silly technobabble and was internally consistent. The world-building was as excellent as the scene-setting, for all that everything took place on one planet, we were well aware of the gravity of the galaxy-spanning consequences of what was going on.
If I have a criticism it is that there were probably too many chapters, essentially too many point-of-view swaps. As the climax of the story reached its crescendo at the tail end of the book the chapters got shorter and shorter, and by chapter 98 where each was only a page or two long, I was convinced the author was just trolling his editor to see what he could get away with.
I well recommend this book to anyone interested in sci-fi generally, and to anyone with an interest in space operas in particular. 4/5
The setting of this story is in the far future at a point where humanity has developed genetic engineering to the point where we have "uplifted" chimpanzees, and most recently dolphins, to human-like intelligence. Humanity has also expanded from the solar system and discovered that they are in fact in a very crowded galaxy of alien civilisations that are horrified to discover that humans apparently arose to intelligence on their own and weren't "uplifted" by a patron alien civilisation, as is traditional in the wider galaxy. By having uplifted two species of their own humanity is grudgingly given a ticket to independence amongst the civilisations by the galactic council rather than being indentured to a superior race, but a lot of fundamental traditionalist aliens aren't very cool with that.
Against all of that a prototype spaceship "Streaker", the first almost entirely crewed by dolphins and with only a handful of humans aboard, is sent out on a shakedown cruise and accidentally stumbles across a derelict armada that seems to be a remnant from the very first civilisation to develop intelligence, and on the trip back to Earth word of this discovery gets out and almost every civilisation in the galaxy starts hunting Streaker, so they can extract the location of the ghost fleet and claim it for themselves. Our story starts after Streaker is ambushed, and forced to flee and hide on a metal-rich waterworld for repairs.
This novel was absolutely fantastic from start to finish. As you may possibly be able to tell it is a bit of a space opera, with the weak and dumb humans almost at the bottom of the galactic food chain and hunted by everyone. There are a vast array of diverse characters, told from many of the character's own points of view at different times, alien, dolphin, computer, human, from underwater, from space, from the planet's liquid mantle. Such an amazingly detailed and realised setting, and absolutely none of it redundant. I could tell every step of the way that every bit of information we were being drip-fed was going to become a relevant plot point later on, but I continually failed at predicting most of the events.
The dolphins had their own multiple well-developed languages, each dolphin had its own clear and distinct personalities, religions, and I have no idea how the author managed to weave together so many complex agendas to make a single story. We were typically only given alien points of view from single examples of each species, but there was no shortage of those, and each was suitably alien yet understandable.
As far as sci-fi goes this is on the softer end, with advanced alien weaponry being of the universe probability altering or psychic sorts, as well as more mundane, so this is a more of an exciting adventure romp than say something like Ringworld. More Star Trek than The Expanse, but it managed to avoid silly technobabble and was internally consistent. The world-building was as excellent as the scene-setting, for all that everything took place on one planet, we were well aware of the gravity of the galaxy-spanning consequences of what was going on.
If I have a criticism it is that there were probably too many chapters, essentially too many point-of-view swaps. As the climax of the story reached its crescendo at the tail end of the book the chapters got shorter and shorter, and by chapter 98 where each was only a page or two long, I was convinced the author was just trolling his editor to see what he could get away with.
I well recommend this book to anyone interested in sci-fi generally, and to anyone with an interest in space operas in particular. 4/5