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Sundiver (The Uplift Saga, Book 1), by David Brin
PDF Ebook Sundiver (The Uplift Saga, Book 1), by David Brin
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About the Author
David Brin is a scientist and the bestselling author of Sundiver, The Uplift War, Startide Rising, The Practice Effect, The Postman, Heart of the Comet (with Gregory Benford), Earth, Glory Season, Brightness Reef, and Infinity's Shore, as well as the short-story collections The River of Time and Otherness. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and has been a NASA consultant and a physics professor.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1. OUT OF THE WHALE-DREAM “Makakai, are you ready?” Jacob ignored the tiny whirrings of motors and valves in his metal cocoon. He lay still. The water lapped gently against the bulbous nose of his mechanical whale, as he waited for an answer. One more time he checked the tiny indicators on his helmet display. Yes, the radio was working. The occupant of the other waldo whale, lying half submerged a few meters away, had heard every word. The water was exceptionally clear today. Facing downward, he could see a small leopard shark swim lazily past, a bit out of place here in the deeper water offshore. “Makakai…are you ready?” He tried not to sound impatient, or betray the tension he felt building in the back of his neck as he waited. He closed his eyes and made the delinquent muscles relax, one by one. Still, he waited for his pupil to speak. “Yesss…let’sss do it!” came the warbling, squeaky voice, at last. The words sounded breathless, as if spoken grudgingly, in lieu of inhalation. A nice long speech for Makakai. He could see the young dolphin’s training machine next to his, its image reflected in the mirrors that rimmed his faceplate. Its gray metal flukes lifted and fell slightly with the swell. Feebly, without their power, her artificial fins moved, sluggishly under the transient, serrated surface of the water. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be, he thought. If technology can wean a dolphin of the Whale-Dream, now’s the time we’ll find out. He chinned the microphone switch again. “All right, Makakai. You know how the waldo works. It will amplify any action you make, but if you want the rockets to cut in, you’ll have to give the command in English. Just to be fair, I have to whistle in trinary to make mine work.” “Yesss!” she hissed. Her waldo’s gray flukes thrashed up once and down with a boom and a spray of saltwater. With a half muttered prayer to the Dreamer, he touched a switch releasing the amplifiers on both Makakai’s waldo and his own, then cautiously turned his arms to set the fins into motion. He flexed his legs, the massive flukes thrust back jerkily in response, and his machine immediately rolled over and sank. Jacob tried to correct but overcompensated, making the waldo tumble even worse. The beating of his fins momentarily made the area around him a churning mass of bubbles, until patiently, by trial and error, he got himself righted. He pushed off again, carefully, to get some headway, then arched his back and kicked out. The waldo responded with a great tail-slashing leap into the air. The dolphin was almost a kilometer off. As he reached the top of his arc, Jacob saw her fall gracefully from a height of ten meters to slice smoothly into the swell below. He pointed his helmet beak at the water and the sea came at him like a green wall. The impact made his helmet ring as he tore through tendrils of floating kelp, sending a golden Garibaldi darting away in panic as he drove downwards. He was going in too steep. He swore and kicked twice to straighten out. The machine’s massive metal flukes beat at the water to the rhythmic push of his feet, each beat sending a tremor up his spine, pressing him against the suit’s heavy padding. When the time was right, he arched and kicked again. The machine ripped out of the water. Sunlight flashed like a missile in his left window, its glare drowning the dim glow of his tiny instrument panel. The helmet computer chuckled softly as he twisted, beak down, to crash into the bright water once again. As a school of tiny silver anchovies scattered before him, Jacob hooted out loud with exhilaration. His hands slipped along the controls to the rocket verniers, and at the top of his next arc he whistled a code in trinary. Motors hummed, as the exoskeleton extended winglets along its sides. Then the boosters cut in with a savage burst, pressing the padded headpiece upward with the sudden acceleration, pinching the back of his skull as the waves swept past, just below his hurtling craft. He came down near Makakai with a great splash. She whistled a shrill trinary welcome. Jacob let the rockets shut off automatically and resumed the purely mechanical leaping beside her. For a time they moved in unison. With each leap Makakai grew more daring, performing twists and pirouettes during the long seconds before they struck the water. Once, in midair, she rattled off a dirty limerick in dolphin, a low piece of work, but Jacob hoped they’d recorded it back at the chase boat. He’d missed the punch line at the crashing end of the aerial cycle. The rest of the training team followed behind them on the hovercraft. During each leap he caught sight of the large vessel, diminished, now, by distance, until his impact cut off everything but the sounds of splitting water, Makakai’s sonar squeaking, and the rushing, phosphorescent blue-green past his windows. Jacob’s chronometer indicated that ten minutes had passed. He wouldn’t be able to keep up with Makakai for more than a half hour, no matter how much amplification he used. A man’s muscles and nervous system weren’t designed for this leap-and-crash routine. “Makakai, it’s time to try the rockets. Let me know if you’re ready and we’ll use them on the following jump.” They both came down into the sea and he worked his flukes in the frothy water to prepare for the next leap. They jumped again. “Makakai, I’m serious now. Are you ready?” They sailed high together. He could see her tiny eye behind a plastic window as her waldo-machine twisted before slicing into the water. He followed an instant later. “Okay, Makakai. If you don’t answer me, we’ll just have to stop right now.” Blue water swept past, along with a cloud of bubbles, as he pushed along beside his pupil. Makakai twisted around and dove down instead of rising for another leap. She chattered something almost too fast to follow in trinary…about how he shouldn’t be a spoilsport. Jacob let his machine rise slowly to the surface. “Come dear, use the King’s English. You’ll need it if you ever want your children to go into space. And it’s so expressive! Come on. Tell Jacob what you think of him.” There were a few seconds of silence. Then he saw something move very fast below him. It streaked upward and, just before it hit the surface, he heard Makakai’s voice shrilly taunt: “Ch-chase me, ch-chump! I fly-y-y!” With the last word, her mechanical flukes snapped back and she leaped out of the water on a column of flame. Laughing, he dove to give himself headway and then launched into the air after his pupil.
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Product details
Series: Uplift (Book 1)
Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Spectra (January 1, 1985)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0553269828
ISBN-13: 978-0553269826
Product Dimensions:
4.2 x 0.9 x 6.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
Average Customer Review:
3.6 out of 5 stars
168 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#594,670 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I read a few David Brin books about 20 years ago and remembered enjoying them, so I picked up Sundiver to explore his universe again. The part that stuck in my memory - the whole Uplift concept - was just as interesting as I remember. The whole concept of his universe is fascinating, especially as it plays out with the relationship between humans and the species they are Uplifting (chimpanzees and dolphins).However the actual story of this particular book is a bit weak. It really is a detective novel set in a sci-fi universe, and I am not a fan of detective novels. The whole Scooby-Do ending is quite contrived and some of the leaps you have to take to accept the explanation are far-fetched (not a spoiler, but an entire race hid a special ability for thousands of years, and no-one noticed? Really?).You also have to accept a fair bit of pseudo-psychobabble, and as someone who studied psychology it was a bit grating. Multiple personalities are NOT schizophrenia, and 'visual glare' doesn't cause psychosis. But if you don't have a psychology background you probably won't notice those things.That being said, I still enjoyed the read and look forward to the rest of the trilogy, which I believe do not have the same 'detective story' style.Also a note for the Kindle edition, it contains quite a lot of distracting errors; misplaced periods, random capitalisation, spelling errors. Far more than I've experienced in a long time reading on the Kindle.
This was completely not what I was expecting, going in.Short version: its not a great book, but it's a quick read, with a few really stand out ideas.Long version:I heard about this book because it's considered the origin (or at least the first, most obvious example of) the "Uplift" trope. Which is to say, the idea that most intelligent species in the universe get that way by being "Uplifted" by another intelligent race. And, for what it's worth, that part of this book is really fascinating and I can see why many other authors have borrowed it.But that is a very small part of this book.Overall, Sundiver is a mystery novel, but not a very good one. (In fairness, I don't really like mystery novels, so I may be a bad judge.) The book also dates itself in a lot of ways. The biggest, for me, is the blending of science and para-sciece that was a fad in Sci-Fi for a while. Think X-Files, where UFO's coexist with telepathy and Ouija boards (only the x-files was, well, good...). Worse, there's a ton of pop-psychology stuff thrown in and given the strength of scientific fact. (Imagine, "Darth Vader, you clearly have a desire to sleep with your mother! But we can put you in a trance and fix it.") There's a lot of stuff, too, that is clearly trying to be politically correct, but by standards that are so out of date now it feels really racist/sexist.All of that might have been okay, except I found the narrator pretty tiresome. He may or may not be deliberately written this way (it relates to all that pop-psych stuff), but he's terrible. He behaves inconsistently, and is constantly daydreaming and not paying attention. I suspect the author was doing this on purpose, so that he could draw attention to "important clues", but it really doesn't work. Passages like this make up, no joke, the majority of the text:"Well, it's a nice day, and also you have terminal cancer."It was a nice day, and the sky was so beautifully cloudless and blue. He thought back to his days on a beach as a young child. Wait, did the Doctor say he has cancer!?YES HE DID. We were paying attention the first time.One last gripe: Reading this book, you would be forgiven for assuming it's the sequel to another book. Everyone is constantly referring back to an earlier event in the protagonist's life, without ever really explaining what happened. I was so confused, I did some googling, and apparently this is just something David Brin does in all his books.One big problem, though: That non-existent first book sounds a lot more interesting.But with all of that, I still gave it three stars. Because it's not unreadable - indeed it's a very quick read. And because it does have some really stellar ideas, even if the author doesn't seem to know himself what's good and what isn't. So for fans of the genre it might be worth picking up for the same reason I did, to see the archetypal "Uplift" book.
The scify concept of Uplift is vague; this book illustrates it as interaction between patron species and client. No race has succeeded alone- with one glaring exception. Two characters introduced early fit the concept: Bubbacub (patron, from Pils) and Culla (servant, from Pring). The patron provides access to the wisdom of others, through something called a 'Galactic Branch Library'. In other words, there is a price (servitude) for galactic knowledge.The protagonist, Jacob Demwa (a human), is the stereotypical damaged investigator- no, consider him a troubleshooter. He has previously taken assignments for some organization called the 'Center for Uplift'. The last caused him great emotional loss. His heart is presently with enhanced Dolphins, speaking their language and learning their humor (the author imagines them sharing limericks). For some reason, he is invited to meet three extra-terrestrials and accompany them to a distant outpost with several other characters (a journalist, a parapsychologist, an administrator).Scouts have seen something- a new species? When you think of it, his group is unqualified to conduct the scientific study ahead; those on-site are already doing fine. The problem is forming hypothesis of what they have seen, and testing those hypothesis on later encounters. One of the investigators tells him:'... Martine shook her head. She looked down and fiddled with a knob on her helmet."It's so complicated. I don't understood [sic] it at all. Nothing's gone right ever since we got back to Mercury. No one is what he appears to be.""What do you mean?"The parapsychologist paused, then shrugged."Never be sure about anyone... I was so sure that Peter's silly pique with Jeffrey was both genuine and harmless. Now I find that it was artificially induced and deadly. And he was right, I guess, about the Solarians, too. Only it wasn't his idea, it was theirs.""Do you think they really are our long lost Patrons?""Who knows?" .... (p. 183)Other reviewers have highlighted the scientific and the psychological errors, and its' missteps as a detective story. The characterizations surprised me- why dispatch a treacherous plotter, a spy, jealous XTs, and others on a hazardous mission? Jacob's intuition tells him that a hoax is being perpetrated. Naturally, the truth comes out during that mission. Only chance saves the evidence.The closing chapter uses political maneuvers to solve remaining problems.Still, you will like the images of ships descending into nuclear plasma following filaments of ionized gas. Brin certainly creates a universe unlike that of other books featuring human-centric or aliens attacking Earth.
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