Sometimes they slide back into animalistic behavior, which is a great obstacle for them.īut wait, there’s more.

And they have their spiritual and animalistic side: the Whale Dream and the Threshold Sea. Brin gave them a tittering song-language. They are impulsive smartasses, which strains their relationship with the humans, but they work well together. Oops.īrin gave the dolphins their own culture and character. Are we orphans? Anyway the Streaker finds a big secret out in space, and since the dolphins are still a bit impulsive, they broadcasted their discovery and now a thousand aliens are on their tail to blast them out of the stars. It turns out that all the aliens in the galaxy had their patrons, going back a few billion years – all alien races are uplifted species themselves – which makes humans a “wolfling” species. We humans are the patron race of the dolphins and chimps, someone to fall back to if they mess up. The story starts with the spaceship Streaker, the first dolphin ship and ‘manned’ by 140 dolphins, seven humans and one chimpanzee. I liked many of the ideas, but the writing left a lot to be desired. I did not expect the uplift idea to be so interesting, to be honest, but that’s what sci-fi authors are for. But what this novel is known for most of all, is dolphins in space, and, along with the other books in the ‘Uplift universe’, the whole uplift concept of uplifting animals to high intelligence. If you love galaxy-wide settings, with alien races and deep time ideas and space ships and strange planets, there is much to like in this novel. I’ll have some of these and some of that, and some of those sweet things over there. David Brin just squeezed in every idea that he thought was cool until the novel was ready to burst. This novel is like a space opera theme park.

Star tide rising