Customer Reviews

Sundiver

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(23)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

I've just finished Sundiver. A member of our local book club had selected Startide Rising. But I wanted to begin at the beginning. Now having read it, I thought I'd review it because, unlike many reviewers, I haven't read anything else by Brin to color my thinking.

This is a detective story. At first I thought this was going to be a hard SF novel. It's not. For most of the book, we follow the protagonist, Jacob Demwa, as he unravels the mystery is "who killed the intelligent chimp in the sunship" and other related riddles. So while we visit Mercury, the Sun, and an entire universe of Brin's imagined future, the plot rests on a couple of tentpole scenes where the protagonist solves the mystery and accuses the criminal. Brin seems to acknowledge the legacy of this device when he refers to one climactic scene as an "Agatha Christie" turn of events.

It's easy to imagine why Brin, at the beginning of a career, would choose such a device. A detective story is an incredibly sturdy workhorse. The detective story's author can introduce a variety of inventions along the detective's quest for clues. In this case, the inventions are a unique future history, galactic structure, alien races, and hard science fiction. And all these inventions are neatly worked into the mystery and its solving.

Unfortunately, this idea only succeeds if you've got an interesting mystery. As a reader, Brin never really courted me into curiosity or concern. Characters are flat. Events and clues work with the plot in oblique angles. We follow, for example, Jacob Demwa to Mercury and beyond but for a good chunk of the novel, no-one really tells him why he's been invited. Often supporting characters can't divulge plot details or help because of some convolution of the plot, apparently to avoid a premature climax.

In a Sherlock Holmes short story, this is okay. It only takes a few pages for Holmes to amaze us with how neatly he deduces a conclusion. Sundiver moves similarly but, unfortunately, with the onus a couple hundred pages of universe building before things come togethor. Brin keeps his mystery closed to the reader. Brin's clues only function for the plot when the plot jerks forward and villains are unmasked. This makes the mystery solving become something of a Rube Goldberg moment. Everything comes together but not in a way we could have possibly conceived.

There are other, smaller flaws dealing with characters, pacing, and setting. Personally, I was particularly put off by how Demwa was surprised by 20th century anachronisms in some scenes but then found using similar anachronisms in other scenes. It made the character seem half baked.

If Brin had made his central idea work and involved the reader in the solving of the mystery, the novel would have worked, even with a whole universe of ideas in tow. But the mystery is forced. We patiently wait for the solution while we watch Brin build his universe. And because we see the artist at work, the novel doesn't succeed in really transporting into its fiction. There's just not enough momentum.

The good news is that we are left with the foundation which Brin then works to create the (hopefully) superior sequels. As a reader, I can't recommend Sundiver: the rewards just aren't big enough. But as an academic, the underpinnings of the novel and how they both fail and succeed are pretty interesting. And they promise a writer with greater things to come. So despite my disappointment, I'm ready to dig into Startide Rising.

David Brin writes science fiction the way it should be written--with imagination, heroic characters, and the triumph of all that is good in the human spirit. "Sundiver" is a prime example of how good Brin's books can be.

Many cite "Startide Rising" as Brin's masterpiece. While "Startide" is a great book (Earth is actually my favorite book written by Brin), I do not think that Sundiver is a "weaker" effort. The two books are apples and oranges. One, "Sundiver," is essentially a mystery. The other, "Startide Rising," is more of an action-adventure book. I recommend them both. "Sundiver" really sets the context for "Startide" nicely.

"Sundiver" is a great mystery that kept me guessing until the end. It is filled with the kind of invention and personal treachery/heroics that make the Uplift series great. Brin has made a visionary world in his two great series.

I recommend this book.

Don't get me wrong, good old "Startide Rising" is the centerpiece of the Uplift novels. If the idea of "uplift" makes perfect sense to you right away, then perhaps you should go straight to Startide. However, the Brin universe took a little "getting aquainted" time (for me, anyway). Here we have a nice bite-size mystery dealing with humans that make about as much sense of this "uplift" thing as the reader. Find out why certain Galactics hate our guts, and why others want to give the poor wolflings a chance in this crazy universe. Unlike later Brin novels (which are drop-dead amazing), this one is a quick sip...you won't need to devote weeks of reading to it (hey I read slow, so sue me) and you'll be ready to plunge right into the next to installments and get the hang of them much better. Bring it along the next time you're on a plane and enjoy this refreshing yarn.

This book is considered the first of Brin's first Uplift Trilogy, but it is really a stand-alone novel, set far apart in setting, plot, and style from _Startide Rising_ and the _Uplift War_. That said, it is in this book that Brin first introduces the readers to the universe that will be developed more fully in his later works-- and what a fascinating universe it is! Humans 'uplifting' dolphins and chimps to a sapience equal to our own, religious/intellectual/political conflict on earth between those who believe that humanity evolved and those who believe that an alien race uplifted us long ago only to abandon us, a vaguely unsettling futuristic social structure where humans are divided into full citizens with rights and 'probationers' without, and of course, a billion-year-old shared culture of galactic races into which earth's young, self-taught, human culture seems to have rudely and unpreparedly been thrust. It's great stuff... but the problem here is the story. What starts off as a kind of sci-fi quest to fly on a 'sunship' into the sun to see if the 'ghosts' that have been reported there might be the lost patron aliens who once uplifted humanity evolves into a murder/sabatoge mystery. That's fine by me, but the 'whodunnit' part of the mystery just doesn't work very well in my book. For the most part, it seems rather convoluted involving aspects of sci-fi physics and alien politics that the reader is not sufficiently introduced to in advance. Even worse is the fact that the entire novel is told from the perspective of a single protagonist-- except for one chapter early on-- in which the reader witnesses a conversation that... well, it doesn't really reveal the *whole* of the whodunnit part of the mystery per se, but it gives you too good of an idea of at least one of the key figures involved. That just strikes me as a storytelling mistake that ought to have been avoided. All in all, this is a decent book, but it's more interesting for the ideas that will come to full bloom in Brin's later uplift books, than for the story itself.

"Sundiver" is a pretty clever book, overall, if only for the fact that it successfuly mixes elements of two different genres. While there are clearly elements of science fiction (that's what the book is marketed as), there's also a strong sense of a good old-fashioned murder mystery within these pages. And the conclusion depends upon the successful fusion of both types of writing... the solution to the "whodunit" is something nobody but a hardcore sci-fi audience would get.

In Brin's story, humanity has made contact with other races throughout the Universe, and found that they are a rare breed: a race which seemed to have developed on its own. Most of the other races they have met can credit their evolution to another race helping them along, a process known as Uplift. Humanity, however, is something of an oddity: an "orphaned" race whose origins are unknown. That doesn't stop them from taking part in Uplift, however. As we learn early on, the human race has undertaken the charge of Uplifting two other Earth races: dolphins and chimpanzees. In the course of the novel, the reader meets examples of both races which have been helped along by humans.

The story centers around a ship called "Sundiver." As its name suggests, the ship's main purpose is to explore the sun. Early on we learn that it has discovered a form of life living within Sol's chromosphere, something which also seems to be previously undocumented elsewhere in the Universe. The question of humanity's Patrons is raised, and many anicent alien races seem at least a little chagrined that this upstart race is discovering more than their collected knowledge can reveal.

When a crew member of Sundiver is killed, however, the story picks up on a different angle, and it becomes critical to not only find out who killed him, but why. The fate of humanity's status among the stars is at risk, and the twists and turns of the story from that point are dramatic, to say the least.

I enjoyed Brin's imaginative story and what he did with it. By framing the mystery aspect of the story in a classic Agatha Christie format of a closed group of possible suspects (including several aliens), he opened up the possibilities of the science-fiction aspect of the story. The question of "who?" could only be answered by first answering the question of "how?" The path that leads to the final answer is long and winding, but in the end it is worth the journey. The final revelation is not shocking in a "Usual Suspects" sense, but it definitely makes the reader re-think some of the conclusions they mave have drawn early on about the characters and their motivations. As in any good murder mystery, all is not as it first appears.

The passages in "Sundiver" which describe the exploration of the Sun itself are worth mentioning as well. They are detailed but not overdone, expressive of majesty but not exaggerated. In short, I really got a sense for what it might be like to travel into that forbidden inferno, what it might look like and how it would feel. That in itself was an impressive acheivement.

"Sundiver" dragged briefly in a few places, but overall it was an entertaining book, and a pretty clever one to boot. A compelling beginning to an idea that has a lot of potential. It makes me curious to read the other books of the Uplift series.

I started this "franchise" of books with the belief that I was getting into a very deep epic. Well I suppose I am, but this book doesnt really capture it. Here is a rundown / summary of the good and bad:

The GOOD:

- Pretty solid character development.

- Very interesting concepts... uplifting species, visiting the Sun, life on the Sun, etc, etc.

- Cool technology that gets explained fairly well and is mostly believable.

- Decent writing style and grammar.

The BAD:

- Somewhat lame "whodunnit" plot.

- A few dorky, non-well thought out alien races.

- Seemed about 50-60 pages too long with some wasted words.

- The hype of the series makes this book a little more disappointing than it might have been on its own.

Overall, this is a decent read, I gave it 3 stars after all. Read this book just to get the basis for the series and then jump to the rest which get better and better so I'm told. I will be reading Startide Rising next.

Recommended, just temper your expectations a bit!

Brin's first novel is notable for introducing the Uplift - a concept so far-reaching and yet almost believable (by sci-fi standards) that it spawned an entire series of books. The basic idea is that a scientifically advanced race will eventually learn enough about genomes to be able to "Uplift" other species to much higher levels of intelligence. In the future, dolphins and chimpanzees will become man's friends and apprentices. Meanwhile, the same process occurs on other planets, many of which have their own family of `client' species, leaving the galaxy filled with scads of sentient alien races. Against this backdrop, the story focuses on some scientific discoveries related to sundiving, and these drive the main plot of this somewhat confused novel. Indeed, the biggest weakness of this sprawling book is not a shortage of interesting ideas, but their overabundance, and a resultant lack of focus. Amidst so many alien species, each with their own secret political agendas, the reader doesn't get a very fair chance to solve the mystery that's presented.

Jacob Dimwa is a renowned hero who once saved the 20-mile-high Vanilla Needle tower from disaster in Ecuador, but was unable to save his beloved wife Tania. Still haunted by the incident, he nurtures an alternate personality that shows up under duress. Now a dolphin specialist, he helps dolphins realize their full intellectual potential (pretty high). He is brought to the Sundiver base on Mercury to help investigate the two unique life forms that have been found living in the sun itself. There's a societal subtext of Citizens versus Probationers (persons with a known tendency towards violence are not allowed near aliens), and the mystery behind Dr. Kepler's medication and illness may be just another red herring. Also, Dr. Martine is having secret discussions with Bubbacub, but are they the real villains here, or is there something even more nefarious at work? And when Jeffrey's ship crashes, was it an accident? Or was it destroyed by external forces protecting their own existence? Or was the ship sabotaged to further someone's political agenda? Dimwa will need all his personalities to find out.

Nothing is as it appears to be in this story, and Brin seems to have gone overboard making sure no one would guess the secrets too early in this surprising mystery. Instead, this reader found that even after the denouement, it was difficult to keep track of who had been responsible for what. So as a mystery, this novel doesn't really play very fair. As science fiction, there are a lot of good ideas here, and Brin does a decent job of giving everyone a unique characterization, particularly all the various aliens. In the last analysis, the problem is the protagonist Dimwa. With the point of view trained on his split personality and tormented past and near-suicide and fear of insanity, we really don't get to have much fun investigating all these outrageous scientific discoveries. The novel seems weighed down by a pall of doom that prevented this reader from enjoying it as much as it the ideas in it deserved. Cut some of the `downers' that don't advance the plot anyway, and you'd have a much better book. Nonetheless, many will wish to read this introduction to the highly acclaimed Uplift Saga. Just don't expect a masterpiece.

Writing excellent science fiction. In my opinion this guy is the master of the genre. He has an uncanny ability to take what is basically a fantastic world and make it real. As you read his works, you feel that you are stepping into reality. Indeed, often what he writes becomes reality a scant 10 years later. He writes as a prophet.

Sundiver was a work deep in character and plot. I found it too enticing to trade in a good night's sleep. There is one twist after another, and the characters continually develop throughout the book. There is a bit of a hint of Ende's work here, with so many hidden stories that wait to be revealed. While at times it is frustrating to not know more of the backstory, this, too, is real life.

Brin has created a deeply believable world and at the same time one utterly unique. He has played with the myth of the orgin of intelligence, building off what we know of from evolution but considering new panspermia possibilities. And for anyone who has ever dreamed of talking with dolphins, here is finally a way to make it happen.

If you're interested in jumping into Brin's excellent uplift universe I suggest you skip Sundiver and move on to Startide Rising and treat IT is the first book. Sundiver is a novella containing some interesting ideas that become a wondrous experience once they are fleshed out in later books. Here they come off as uninspired and are presented with a plot that is awkward and an environment (the Sun no less) that is hard to identify with. The book as a whole fails to induce us to suspend our disbelief.

I am serious, the Uplift series is possibly the best thing in Sci-Fi... just don't expect this book to convince you of that. Startide Rising is reasonably engrossing and the next book, The Uplift War is just a damn good book. The second cycle, the Uplift Trilogy (beginning with Brightness Reef) has a depth and power and fascination that will take your breath away. I constantly find myself reviewing these books in my mind, wondering what it would be like to take all the *implied* stories that must be passed over and flesh them out and expand the seriese. For example, the years-long defense of Earth would make an outstanding new trilogy.

I have nothing but raves for the Uplift series as a whole... but in my own mind I don't really count Sundiver as a member of that august body.

On a side note... if there happen to be any Brin fans out there who aren't sure whether his new book Kiln People looks like you're cup of tea, I suggest you try it out. The dust-cover synopsis put me off for quite a while but I finally gave the book and chance and it delivered in spades. My new motto is "trust Brin".