Startide Rising

There's a character in Neil Gaiman's American Gods who is impossible for other characters to remember. As soon as he speaks, other characters forget what he's just said. I find David Brin has that same quality for me - I had to backtrack so many times in both this book and the preceding novel, Sundiver. It's like entire scenes just slipped my brain as soon as they were over - which is espeially unfortunate in a book like Startide Rising that has a huge cast and a bunch of subplots. Maybe part of the issue is that the stuff that happens off-stage in this book - mentioend in various expository dialogue but never fully described - sound way more interesting than the partof the book we have to read in real time. Discovering a fleet of mysterious, abandoned ships (complete with mystery mummy) and the resulting firefight and excape sounds much more exciting than the main action of Startide Rising, which is really just them fixing a broken ship and occasionally chasing each other through the planet's ocean for literally days.

But the bigger problem is that I just don't like uplift as a concept. For me, neither the concept nor the execution has aged well. Coming from a modern perspetive in which our current planet cannot sustain the sentient human population, the idea of creating even more sentient beings (dolphins, chipanzees) seems bizarre. And I think uplift raises some really profound parallels with racism, eugenics, slavery, and colonialism that Brin is either unequipped or unwilling to handle - or perhaps just totally unaware. After all, this is suppsoedly a post-racial human society (that has definitely, totally rid itself of all racism) - yet the human engineer who is described as "black" is repeatedly referred to as "the black engineer" and the most respected - and ultimate heroes - of the book (from my hazy memory of their description) still look like (white) Ken and Barbie. Plus, frankly, I just find the idea of anthropomorphized dolphins and chimpanzees just awkwardly, uncomfortably childish. The big "reveal" about the true nature of some of the dolphins felt like it came from a Disney/Pixar movie - some strange, oversexed Disney movie where I have to ensdure graphic descriptions of dolphin penises and their attendant sexual desires. And, finally, I could certainly do without this other character that appeared in both Sundiver and Startide Rising: the bikini-clad human "femme scientists" who pretend to hate sxual harassment but are actually asking for it, always DTF, and really just wants a man to put her in her place. Sufffice it to say, I will not be reading the rest of the Uplift Universe. How this novel won any, let alone multiple awards, I have to chalk up to some peculiarty of ancient sci fi literary history that I'll never understand.