Startide Rising
by David Brin
Summary
The Streaker is the first starship crewed mostly by uplifted dolphins, with seven humans and one chimpanzee aboard, and it has found something in a dead region of space: a derelict fleet of fifty thousand ships, ancient beyond dating, and a body that may belong to the Progenitors, the species every galactic religion believes began the chain of uplift.
The Streaker transmits the images and is immediately hunted by every fanatic species in the galaxy, several of which begin fighting each other over the right to capture it. The crew crash the ship into the water world of Kithrup to hide, and the novel is what happens on and under that ocean while battles are fought in orbit above.
The dolphins are the achievement. Brin gives them three languages, Primal Dolphin for instinct, Trinary for poetry in haiku like triplets, and Anglic for human business, and shows a species only two centuries into intelligence coming apart under stress, some reverting toward the wild, some going murderously mutinous.
There is a young human captain out of his depth, a xenoarchaeologist, a metal poisoned ecology, and a great deal of undersea action.
The galactic politics are the other pleasure. Dozens of species with incompatible religions converge on Kithrup, and Brin keeps cutting away to their bewildered command decks, where ancient patron races fight each other to a standstill over a claim nobody can adjudicate.
Around five hundred pages, told in very short chapters across a large cast, and it moves quickly despite the scale.
The 1980s hard science fiction habits are visible: the human characters are thinner than the dolphins, and some of the sexual politics has dated. The invention has not.
It follows Sundiver but stands entirely alone. Best for readers who want genuinely inventive aliens, a real sense of galactic scale, and a species two centuries old deciding what it wants to be.
Historical Context & Significance
Startide Rising won the 1984 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, an unusually complete sweep, and David Brin won the Hugo again in 1988 for The Uplift War.
It was his second novel. He holds a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California and has consulted for NASA, and the uplift premise, that no species reaches sapience without a patron, is a deliberate inversion of the usual galactic hierarchy: humanity's crime in this universe is having done it alone, and its second crime is having uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees without a licence.
The Uplift books were among the most popular hard science fiction of the 1980s, and the dolphin languages in particular are still cited as one of the field's better attempts at nonhuman thought.