Sundiver

This was Brin's first novel. He poured a lot of skill and imagination into it, and must have thought he'd written a masterpiece when it was done. It's the beginning of his Uplift series, featuring a new and original kind of galactic civilization in which status is acquired by ‘uplifting' other species into full intelligence. It's also hard science fiction, in which spaceships dive into the fringes of the sun; we read how they are able to do this and what they see when they do it.

The story has a definite plot to it, and it's quite readable apart from the lengthy descriptive passages and some of the scientific details. Brin must have been proud of all this, but I'm afraid I tend to skim through it: I just want to read the story.

The hero, Jacob Demwa, is a rather strange man who seems to have unusual capabilities, but is suffering from some kind of split personality, all of which is not very well explained in the course of the story. We get only little fragments of his past history in flashbacks.

It's a pretty good first novel by the standards of 1980, and I wouldn't dismiss it as a mere mediocrity. However, I don't enjoy it enough to reread it regularly or to give it more than two stars. I reread it in 2022 only because I last read it 31 years before and had forgotten everything about it: I had to reread it in order to have any opinion about it.

The central importance of uplift to Brin's galactic civilization is an original idea, and somewhat interesting, but I don't find it convincing. I could believe in one alien species becoming obsessed with uplift, but all of them? Surely they're too diverse to share what seems to me a kind of religion.

All known alien species in this galaxy, with the possible exception of humans, attained intelligence through being uplifted by older species, the oldest of which are long extinct. Presumably the oldest species, at least, must have attained intelligence without help; why not others?

Brin is entitled to dream up this particular galactic scenario if it makes him happy, but I'm sorry, I don't believe in it.