Book Review: Brightness Reef, by David Brin
The start of a second Uplift trilogy. Uplift > Star Trek > Star Wars
Bantam Spectra, 1995, 514 pages
Millennia ago, the advanced Buyur civilization held sway on Jijo, but eventually abandoned it to restore its ecological balance. Ever since, the Five Galaxies have patrolled it to prevent resettlement. Brightness Reef is a bold and visionary saga of humans and aliens joining the fight for survival, and to uncover the truth about their mythic pasts.
I am not sure how to explain why the sequel to one of my very favorite science fiction series has been sitting on my shelf for over 20(!) years unread. But that's what happens when you buy many more books than you can read. So the second Uplift trilogy has been staring at me accusingly for years and years waiting for me to get around to it, while I've claimed that David Brin is one of my favorite authors. At long last, I am getting to it.
So first let me talk about the Uplift universe. The first trilogy consists of Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War. They are somewhat a product of the 80s when they were written: all the Earthlings, despite living centuries from now in a universe where Earth is now governed by a Terragens Council and humans coexist with sentient dolphins and chimpanzees and aliens who range from murderous towers of rings to sentient light cones, basically talk and act like 20th century Americans. But I have long held them up as an example of how literary SF > movie SF, because the Uplift series is like a Star Trek/Star Wars universe (intergalactic empires with a multitude of alien races and ultra-advanced technology), but it does all the things with space opera you can do when you don't have to dumb it down for a normie audience.
The premise of the Uplift series is that every sentient race in the Five Galaxies (supposedly there were once even more connected galaxies) was discovered as a pre-sentient species by a patron race which uplifted them through a careful program of behavioral and bio-engineering over hundreds of generations. Client races spend tens of thousands of years in service to their patrons, before being freed to begin the process of uplifting their own clients, and so on and so on over millions of years. This cycle has been continued for over a billion years, going back to a fabled Progenitors race.
Enter the Earthlings. Earth is discovered by the Galactics just as humans are beginning to reach outside their own star system. The Galactics assume that humanity is a "wolfling" race, criminally abandoned by their patrons for unknown reasons. Mankind's claim to have evolved on its own is widely disbelieved, because Galactics consider this to be impossible. A race evolving to sapience by itself has literally never been seen before.
Normally, the fate of humanity would have been to be "adopted" by a patron race and essentially consigned to 50,000 years of slavery. But it just so happens that humans had already begun the process of "uplifting" their own client species: chimpanzees and dolphins, who are now sentient if not quite "finished." This (and the help of a few friendly Galactic races who supported the newly-discovered "wolflings") just barely earned Earthclan the status of independent Patron race.
The first Uplift trilogy was about mankind's struggle to secure a place in a hostile universe full of vastly more powerful aliens, some of whom are genocidal religious fanatics or who just resent the wolflings on principle. There was a lot of galactic politics, really advanced technologies and kick-ass space fleets, unimaginably ancient artifacts, and a universe full of aliens for whom a thousand years is a short-term plan.
So that's basically a review of the first trilogy. I read it 30 years ago. Then Brin wrote a second Uplift trilogy in the 90s, and I… bought it and never got around to reading it. And here we are.
Brightness Reef at first appears to be a completely stand-alone new story, but eventually (not until the end, though) it picks up threads that were left dangling in the first trilogy.
The entire book is set on one planet: Jijo. Jijo is a world that was left "fallow" by its previous residents. According to Galactic law, colony worlds are required to be abandoned every few million years so their ecologies can recover and hopefully produce new life forms. Because it's abandoned and off-limits, Galactics don't normally visit Jijo, and that's why over the past few millennia, no less than seven different races of outlaw settlers have arrived there. They each came for their own reasons, and all of them will face severe punishment when the Galactics finally arrive and find them illegally squatting on the planet. The most recent arrivals were a group of Earthlings, who have been living on Jijo for a few centuries now.
Brightness Reef demonstrates how even in a vast universe spanning five galaxies and thousands of empires, there is plenty of worldbuilding and intrigue on a single planet. Jijo has its own history, going back to its "earliest" settlers (not counting the former occupants who lived here a million years ago), and each new wave of arrivals triggered disruption, wars, and new alliances. Now all six races live more or less in harmony (with the seventh race, the first arrivals, having already devolved back to non-sentience). They live a nearly medieval existence, having eschewed almost all technology as this would attract Galactic attention. But some of them still remember the wars of a few generations ago, and there are political and religious disagreements among the Jijoans. Some believe they should destroy even what little technology they have and accelerate their path to devolution and a return to animal innocence. Others have always had an ulterior motive for coming to Jijo.
A lot of Brightness Reef reads more like a planetary romance than a space opera. There are multiple POVs, mostly from several of Jijo's human settlers, but also from a multi-species group of juvenile friends who want to have Adventures. When Adventure comes to Jijo, it's in the form of the long-feared Galactic starship, which may spell doom for everyone on the planet. Except the visitors turn out to be criminals themselves, and bring their own mysteries.
I liked the start of the new trilogy, but the pace was slow at first, and it's only in the last third that things get really interesting. It ends very much To Be Continued, so like many "trilogies" nowadays it's really a single story split into multiple volumes.
Also by David Brin: My review of The Postman.
My complete list of book reviews.
Bantam Spectra, 1995, 514 pages
Millennia ago, the advanced Buyur civilization held sway on Jijo, but eventually abandoned it to restore its ecological balance. Ever since, the Five Galaxies have patrolled it to prevent resettlement. Brightness Reef is a bold and visionary saga of humans and aliens joining the fight for survival, and to uncover the truth about their mythic pasts.
I am not sure how to explain why the sequel to one of my very favorite science fiction series has been sitting on my shelf for over 20(!) years unread. But that's what happens when you buy many more books than you can read. So the second Uplift trilogy has been staring at me accusingly for years and years waiting for me to get around to it, while I've claimed that David Brin is one of my favorite authors. At long last, I am getting to it.
So first let me talk about the Uplift universe. The first trilogy consists of Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War. They are somewhat a product of the 80s when they were written: all the Earthlings, despite living centuries from now in a universe where Earth is now governed by a Terragens Council and humans coexist with sentient dolphins and chimpanzees and aliens who range from murderous towers of rings to sentient light cones, basically talk and act like 20th century Americans. But I have long held them up as an example of how literary SF > movie SF, because the Uplift series is like a Star Trek/Star Wars universe (intergalactic empires with a multitude of alien races and ultra-advanced technology), but it does all the things with space opera you can do when you don't have to dumb it down for a normie audience.
The premise of the Uplift series is that every sentient race in the Five Galaxies (supposedly there were once even more connected galaxies) was discovered as a pre-sentient species by a patron race which uplifted them through a careful program of behavioral and bio-engineering over hundreds of generations. Client races spend tens of thousands of years in service to their patrons, before being freed to begin the process of uplifting their own clients, and so on and so on over millions of years. This cycle has been continued for over a billion years, going back to a fabled Progenitors race.
Enter the Earthlings. Earth is discovered by the Galactics just as humans are beginning to reach outside their own star system. The Galactics assume that humanity is a "wolfling" race, criminally abandoned by their patrons for unknown reasons. Mankind's claim to have evolved on its own is widely disbelieved, because Galactics consider this to be impossible. A race evolving to sapience by itself has literally never been seen before.
Normally, the fate of humanity would have been to be "adopted" by a patron race and essentially consigned to 50,000 years of slavery. But it just so happens that humans had already begun the process of "uplifting" their own client species: chimpanzees and dolphins, who are now sentient if not quite "finished." This (and the help of a few friendly Galactic races who supported the newly-discovered "wolflings") just barely earned Earthclan the status of independent Patron race.
The first Uplift trilogy was about mankind's struggle to secure a place in a hostile universe full of vastly more powerful aliens, some of whom are genocidal religious fanatics or who just resent the wolflings on principle. There was a lot of galactic politics, really advanced technologies and kick-ass space fleets, unimaginably ancient artifacts, and a universe full of aliens for whom a thousand years is a short-term plan.
So that's basically a review of the first trilogy. I read it 30 years ago. Then Brin wrote a second Uplift trilogy in the 90s, and I… bought it and never got around to reading it. And here we are.
Brightness Reef at first appears to be a completely stand-alone new story, but eventually (not until the end, though) it picks up threads that were left dangling in the first trilogy.
The entire book is set on one planet: Jijo. Jijo is a world that was left "fallow" by its previous residents. According to Galactic law, colony worlds are required to be abandoned every few million years so their ecologies can recover and hopefully produce new life forms. Because it's abandoned and off-limits, Galactics don't normally visit Jijo, and that's why over the past few millennia, no less than seven different races of outlaw settlers have arrived there. They each came for their own reasons, and all of them will face severe punishment when the Galactics finally arrive and find them illegally squatting on the planet. The most recent arrivals were a group of Earthlings, who have been living on Jijo for a few centuries now.
Brightness Reef demonstrates how even in a vast universe spanning five galaxies and thousands of empires, there is plenty of worldbuilding and intrigue on a single planet. Jijo has its own history, going back to its "earliest" settlers (not counting the former occupants who lived here a million years ago), and each new wave of arrivals triggered disruption, wars, and new alliances. Now all six races live more or less in harmony (with the seventh race, the first arrivals, having already devolved back to non-sentience). They live a nearly medieval existence, having eschewed almost all technology as this would attract Galactic attention. But some of them still remember the wars of a few generations ago, and there are political and religious disagreements among the Jijoans. Some believe they should destroy even what little technology they have and accelerate their path to devolution and a return to animal innocence. Others have always had an ulterior motive for coming to Jijo.
A lot of Brightness Reef reads more like a planetary romance than a space opera. There are multiple POVs, mostly from several of Jijo's human settlers, but also from a multi-species group of juvenile friends who want to have Adventures. When Adventure comes to Jijo, it's in the form of the long-feared Galactic starship, which may spell doom for everyone on the planet. Except the visitors turn out to be criminals themselves, and bring their own mysteries.
I liked the start of the new trilogy, but the pace was slow at first, and it's only in the last third that things get really interesting. It ends very much To Be Continued, so like many "trilogies" nowadays it's really a single story split into multiple volumes.
Also by David Brin: My review of The Postman.
My complete list of book reviews.