As a wee lad there was little I liked better than diving into well-crafted fiction. Of particular interest was that of the science fiction kind, so it’s little surprise that Startide Rising by David Brin grabbed me so, being a tight and mostly fast-paced adventure yarn.

The book, part of a series called the Uplift Saga, takes place several hundred years in the future when, as seems to so often be the case, mankind is out amongst the stars. Naturally the universe is full of beings hostile to the destiny of Man, and if you’re already rolling your eyes here, thinking this doesn’t sound particularly novel, you’re right but with one caveat and its a concept I haven’t seen tackled before. In fact, its the defining aspect that gives the series its name: Uplift. You see, in this galactic society, one of the founding principles is the care and stewardship of the younger species. A patron species will take a younger, pre-sentient one, and through genetic manipulation “uplift” that species into sentience. The greater the number of species uplifted, the greater the status of the patron species as well as that of the client species, being a part of their clan.

Humans, however, have emerged onto the scene claiming to have had no patron race leading them to sentience. This is heresy to the more conservative aliens. Every one of them can trace their lineage back to the very first race, the long-vanished Progenitors. What’s more, humanity had already been in the process of uplifting two other species on Earth before stepping out into the wider galactic society: Chimpanzees and dolphins. Having multiple species as clients should give humans even greater prestige, but instead serves mainly to fuel hatred for this race of upstarts.

Amidst these tensions, the first ship crewed almost exclusively by dolphins—an attempat at giving them further responsibility as the next step in their uplift—stumbles across a fleet of starships that seemingly belonging to the long-lost Progenitors. They report back to Earth for instructions but their message is intercepted and soon spreads throughout the galaxy, igniting galactic war and a race by the more conservative factions to capture the dolphins’ ship in order to discover what they’ve learned.

As this is only the first book I’ve read in this series (although technically the second in the saga; the first is apparently almost a completely separate storyline, merely existing in the same universe), I’m reserving judgment regarding its place in the overarching narrative. As a standalone novel, however, it’s got just about everything you could ask for: sympathetic characters, strange aliens, galactic war (although localized in this novel around the dolphins’ ship and her crew), and the hint of secrets from the past. None of this is handled with exceptional talent, but the storyline and writing are engaging enough that I found it hard to put this book down and make time for my more serious reading. Somehow Warren Buffett just couldn’t compete with smart aleck dolphins.

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