Customer Reviews

Brightness Reef (Uplift Trilogy, 1)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Currently, there are six books in Brin's Uplift saga. It's kind of hard to categorize these books as elements of a series, though. The first three books in the saga, "Sundiver," "Startide Rising," and "The Uplift War," are not really a trilogy or a series in the normal sense. Instead, "Sundiver" relates to the rest of the saga as Tolkien's "The Hobbit" relates to his "Lord of the Rings:" it sets the stage for all the rest of the books in the saga. "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War" describe completely different plotlines originating from the same event far distant, time wise and space wise, from "Sundiver". In a pinch, you could read these books in any order and not really miss anything. They describe different points in time and space of the same Universe. Of course, the best order is the one listed, above.

Unlike the first three books in the saga, the second three books DO form a series. The first of this trilogy, "Brightness Reef," picks up with yet another totally independent plotline and brand new characters. However, it does contain a central character who ties the first three books into this set. Unfortunately, Brin doesn't say, specifically, who that character is until the very end of the book. Even worse, the last time the character was used was so far back in the saga that it's hard to remember anything about him. The remaining two books, "Infinity's Shore" and "Heaven's Reach," continue sequentially from the first and form a tightly knit trilogy with no breaks in time.

None of these books is "happy" or "light reading." For the most part, they're all intense, heavily detailed and fully characterized books. "Sundiver" is the least "heavy" and most lacking in the realistic feel of the rest of the books. But, for the most part, if you like "Sundiver," you'll definitely want to continue with the rest of the saga. Even if you don't like "Sundiver," I highly recommend you read at least "Startide Rising:" it has an entirely different feel to it and might be more to your liking. This saga is just too important to miss out on. As a whole, it's one of the great works of science fiction and one of the few pieces of science fiction that belong in the class of true literature.

The following are some comments on the individual books:

Sundiver: Somewhat different from the other books in the saga in that it's more of a science fiction mystery than a science fiction drama. This book sets the stage for the rest of the saga as it chronicles events that happen several hundred years before what happens in the other books. About the only thing negative I can come up with is that I wish Brin had written several prequels to it so we could read about the earlier adventures of Jacob Demwa that are referenced in this book.

Startide Rising: This book focuses on the group that starts all the other events noted in the remaining books of the saga. Though the main characters start off in a very bad way, Brin does a good job of moving them forward, and upward, throughout the book.

The Uplift War: The events in this book start from the same event that kicks off "Startide Rising." But, other than that, the two books are totally independent. Like "Startide Rising," Brin produced a gripping plot, great character development, and a good progression towards a positive goal.

Brightness Reef: This is definitely not a happy book. It starts out with many non-pleasant activities and fights its way forward from there. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very hard to see how anything good or positive is going to happen to the main characters, no matter how much they try.

Infinity's Shore: First, the negative: once this book starts, it's very apparent that a whole lot of relevant stuff has been happening elsewhere that we missed. Essentially, there's at least one entire book that sounds extremely interesting that's missing from the saga. Brin fills in most of this back-story during this book and "Heaven's Reach." But, I'd sure like to have read that missing book. On the positive side, this book re-introduces us to old friends and subtly changes the focus to them. Everything's still happening in the same place with mostly the same characters, but the attitude changes and becomes more can-do.

Heaven's Reach: One difficulty with this book is due to how it continues from the previous book. It's merely a change of venue instead of a new set of adventures. A quote from one of the main characters near the end of this book sort of sums up my feelings about it: "...what will one more worry matter? I've long passed the point where I stopped counting them." Essentially, by the time this book and saga starts winding down (and even at the point of that quotation, it really hasn't started that yet), the reader is totally fatigued by never-ending problems. I really like these works, but the lack of a tie-up between "Infinity's Shore" and this book is grinding.

With "Brightness Reef" Brin starts another trilogy in his uplift universe. This time the first book is the best: the multi-species society on JiJo is introduced in a way that gets the reader hooked. The galactics who invade - including the "Streaker-" refugees are boring by comparison. Unfortunately they get much of the attention in the following two books. With the first uplift trilogy it was the other way round: the last book - "Uplift War"- was the best. With the new trilogy the two books following this are a disappointment. Best to stop reading the trilogy after having finished this one.

The following is a review of the entire Uplift Storm trilogy, not just Brightness Reef.

David Brin has turned out superior sci-fi in the past; Startide Rising was excellent and The Uplift War was not far behind. Unfortunately these three books do not quite measure up to those previous efforts. While frequently entertaining, they nevertheless suffer from significant faults.

The biggest problem with these books is that they are overlong and plodding. This "trilogy" needed a firm hand at the editor's desk. This story could have been told in a more satisfying way in probably about 60% of the total number of pages Brin used.

Brightness Reef starts us off with a new setting on Jijo and an entirely new cast of characters, which is OK except that Brin takes forever to develop the story and move things along. Consequently, the reader has a hard time feeling a connection with Jijo and the society that Brin paints for us there. Everytime it seems things are beginning to click, Brin goes off on another tangent and fails to bring any urgency to the story. Infinity's Shore delivers more of the same, with perhaps some marginal improvement due to the reappearance of some characters that will be familiar to readers of the prior Uplift books.

By the end of two books, I finally began to feel caught up in the story of Jijo and was looking forward to the concluding volume. So what does Brin do but give us a third book that spends zero time on Jijo. OK, he does still follow the principal characters from the first two books, but he spent an enormous amount of time in those books effectively making Jijo into a character, which he then essentially abandons. Even worse, he sets a frantic pace that despite all the havoc fails to impart much urgency or tension. The only real suspense was whether Brin would somehow salvage a coherent finale to the trilogy. The answer is no.

The pacing of these books is terribly uneven, both internally and (especially) as between the first two and the finale. The story wanders badly. The reader is left with the feeling that Brin had no idea of where he was taking the story and just writing chapters on the fly. Many loose ends, large and small, are left hanging. The final result is a disorganized, unconvincing story that fails to deliver on its promise.

I still give this set reasonable marks though, as Brin has delivered some wonderfully inventive ideas and the books certainly do have their entertaining moments. But Brin has done better, and these books could have been truly outstanding. As it is, I recommend them only for serious fans.

**** If this review were "published" by Specta it would read like this:****

First, to be clear, this his a review of the Kindle Edition published by Spectra. It hurts me to write this rearview because the author and this navel do not deserve a one out of five stares. The publisher, Spectra, on the other hend has committed @ fraud on the consumers and has insulated the author.

**** Enough!****

David Brin's ability to invoke an enticing and immersive cast and plot is well known. What the publisher has done is pass off a "digital" copy that looks like it was published by scanning the novel and then using circa 2000 OCR software (my apologies to the software companies, they don't deserve the comparison) to create this "digital" version.

I am not a grammarian, and I'm writing this review in Word so it's spell checked, and yet with all my shortcomings in this area I STILL find the errors disrupting to the flow of the novel and for the first time since Nov '07 find myself regretting getting a book on my Kindle.

Brin's Uplift universe is one of my all-time favorites and with the exception of Sundiver, I have purchased each novel as they were published. When I saw there was going to be a Kindle edition I was thrilled to bring the series into my digital library. Now I find myself wondering what the last two books in the series will look like.....

I give this book 3 stars because it is an interesting and well told story as a stand alone. I give it only 3 because it does not add anything of value to the series. Brin wrote his original series promising a secret would be revealed that would completely change his universe. In his second trilogy he essentially creates a new setting so he can write a couple extra books and prolong revealing the big secret. Though I have not read the second and third books yet, at this point I am simply impatient with the series as a whole. Basically this book just opens new questions without providing any new answers.

David Brin's Brightness Reef centers around the planet Jijo and the six species of intelligent beings that have unlawfully settled on it. One of these species is, of course, Human. Others include the furry Urs, the crustacean-like Qheuen, the "wheelchair"-bound g'Kek, and the multi-ringed Traeki...as well as several other species. After many years of war amongst the intelligent species on Jijo, several generations of peace have reigned. Until Galactic criminals arrive on Jijo in an attempt to steal potential candidates for Uplift...and perhaps do other damage to those living peacefully on the planet.

Nothing is what it seems in this book. The reader starts out with a certain series of facts laid out in the first half of the book, and then by the end, most of what we think we know turns out to be...not quite what one thinks in the beginning. This goes for character development as well as the interlinking plots of the book. The biggest problem I have with the book is that NONE of the major plotlines of the book are resolved after 659 paperback pages. Granted, this is a trilogy, but Brin should have tried a bit harder to close at least a few of the more minor plotlines, making the transition of the major plotlines to the next book a bit easier. Of course, I have yet to read the next book, Infinity's Shore, perhaps Brin does a better job in bringing the storylines together and continuing them...but if the conclusion to Brightness Reef is any clue, Brin will have had a tough time.

Despite the loose, relatively undisciplined tangle of storylines, Brin's story is enjoyable and believable given the circumstances. In fact, he does a superb job of weaving together the complex relationships between Jijo's multiple intelligent species...as well as giving the reader a firm grasp of how these alien species view themselves with respect to Jijo and its environs. Also, despite the story taking place very separate from Galactic culture as a whole, Brin does a good job of giving the reader some insight into how the six species of Jijo connect to the greater Galactic culture.

Overall, despite the numerous loose ends left untied (some of which I thought could be tied) Brin's Uplift is an enjoyable read and I look forward to continuing onto the next book.

Six sentient species live together secretly in hard-won harmony on the planet Jijo, which the almighty Galactics have decreed to be left unsettled. All goes well until their discovery by a starship crewed by humans with a mysterious purpose throws everything into chaos and uncertainty.

David Brin is telling a big story here. The planet and the various alien cultures upon it are meticulously detailed and his concept of Uplift, whereby races achieve sentience and admittance to a heavily stratified galactic society through the patronage of more advanced races, remains one of the most brilliant concepts in science fiction.

However, be warned. This is not a stand-alone book. As Brin himself acknowledges in his afterword, his story just kept expanding in the telling until it could no longer be contained within a single volume. This book does not even attempt to provide a temporary conclusion but rather leaves all of the various plot strands waving in thin air. Therefore, I do recommend this book, but only if you are prepared to go on and read the next two in the trilogy as well.

The Uplift books are great - on paper. The Kindle Editions have a shameful number of typos. I suspect they were turned into Kindle editions with OCR and nobody even looked at them before they were posted for sale. Brightness Reef is particularly bad, with typos on every page. Some of the sentences are so battered that a person who never read the paper copies would have trouble figuring out what they said. Also - No table of contents! Ridiculous.

If you're desperate to read this series, here's a shortcut: Read the first three pages of each chapter.

For anyone who's read "Atlas Shrugged", you'll recognize the tactic of hideous, layered repetition. Specifically, you'll note that Brin takes the liberty of summarizing The Entire Series again, and again, and again. There _are_ new ideas involved in these books, and that's why I'm handing out the second star, but comparing these to "Startide Rising" is like comparing "Family Matters" to "Friends".

Buy the Cliff's Notes if you have to, or find an online summary, or just start with book three (which contains summaries of the important events in the first two). The whole series just isn't worth your time.

Quite some time ago, David Brin wrote a neat series of books involving his fictional galaxy(ies), putting into play a number of interesting alien races and a plausible future history that managed to be both compelling and realistic and mythical. In those books we learned that races, in order to be become sentinent, have to be sponsored and uplifted by another race and in doing so are ready to join the larger galactic community. Of course, plucky humans come along and spoil it by essentially jumping the chain and becoming uplifted without the proper channels, barging right into everything as they so often do.

The first series of Uplift novels (comprising "Sundiver", "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War") were linked themetically but didn't really form a single plotline, in fact at the time I read them I remember being very annoyed that the intriguing thread involving the ship and crew from "Startide Rising" basically discovering something they shouldn't have and making a break for it wasn't picked up in "The Uplift War" except for very tangentially (ie they're still running for it at the end). Time passed, both between Brin writing new books and me getting around to reading them. So here we are, at the start of the new trilogy.

My advice: brush up. Seriously.

I read the first series probably when I was in college, which is not in the Dark Ages but probably a good seven or eight years ago, at best. But a good background in what's gone before will probably help you a great deal here. Not at first becausre the initial setup is that a handful of races have been living on isolated/off-limits planet Jijo for a number of years, in secret. Everything has been going pretty swell, until the rest of the galaxy figures it out and decides to show up. Things quickly become very complicated as the colonists have to figure out whether the newcomers are there to punish or study them while the new arrivals find there are bigger issues to worry about. Oh, and did I fail to mention that there's like ten alien races all with different mannerisms and points of view all sprinkled throughout the novel?

The fact that Brin makes this work at all speaks to how underrated a writer he is. He switches points of view often, going from race to race and manages the neat trick of being able to convey a character as alien while still allowing you to relate to them. Often you'll forget that someone isn't human until they mention they have gills or something. With the constant shifting of events you tend to get a crosssection, which means you have to pay attention to piece things together as most of the time nobody sticks around to explain recent plot developments. His prose is also surprisingly sharp for a guy with a doctorate in science, although he has been writing for some time now.

The biggest mark against this book is that it's very hard to keep all the races straight without some kind of checklist and there are so many factions and areas on the planet that things can get confusing as to who belongs to what even before the spaceship shows up. This at times can make it difficult to figure out who is fighting over what and what kind of stake anyone has in anything. This can probably be alleviated by not taking two months to read the book like I did (hey, I was busy) and by reading the original series right before it so that things have some more context. Thus, while events are constantly happening and it's really never less than interesting, it's not exactly emotionally compelling at times.

Also, and you probably figured this out but it's the first book of a trilogy, which more specifically means it's the first third of a very long novel. You don't really get a proper ending so much as "Hey, it's over!" and if that kind of thing bothers you, then you may want to reserve time and read them all straight through.

Which is good advice in general, especially when coupled with the first trilogy. Reading all four together is probably an excellent SF reading experience, as Brin's imagination and mastery over the plot is pretty keen. But coming years off the series and taking a while to read this, there were a few "Why do I care about this?" moments. Your mileage will probably vary but full disclosure and all that.

But all around decent, although it would be nice if he finally resolved the Streaker plot. Please?