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After 2014’s SFWA ‘censorship� kerfuffle, I hadn’t planned on reading any David Brin� but that wasn’t something I remembered when this book showed up at the library used bookstore, and I’m weak for the idea of sentient dolphins in sci fi, so� here I am.

The big ideas of this book were what intrigued me: the concept of uplift, the mystery of the Progenitors who uplifted the first other species, and the question of what the planet Kithrup had to do with anything. The problem is that, while all those big ideas are discussed, there’s just� not a lot of resolution given. Many characters are left hanging mid-plotline by the end of the book, many questions asked but not answered, and those that are given answers (like Kithrup’s history) are only shallowly explored. Overall, I left Startide Rising feeling like David Brin had made promises to his audience that he didn’t bother to keep.

One of the factors that contributed to that was the sheer number of points of view. Honestly, I couldn’t even try to count the different third-person-limited (with occasional divergences into third omniscient, to my annoyance) perspectives Brin used. This meant the cast ballooned out of control rapidly, and even at the beginning it was difficult to track everything that was going on. What’s more, some perspectives didn’t even have a bearing on the plot whatsoever: several chapters were told from the POV of an alien ally to humans, who then died a few hundred pages later without having actually done anything. I found myself comparing this approach to POV with that used by Brandon Sanderson in The Stormlight Archives - while it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I find that Sanderson’s limited main cast and brief interludes to other viewpoints worked well for me. I wish that Brin had managed something of the same grace.

The unfortunate effect of the bloated cast list was that, because no one got a lot of pagetime or introspection, I just wasn’t emotionally invested in any of them. Character deaths or noble sacrifices had no resonance, because the narrative never spent enough time with them to establish them as individuals.

I think the final straw for me, personally, was a marine biology failure. Brin somehow managed to completely confuse pygmy killer whales ( Feresa attenuata ) with orca whales ( Orcinus orca ). Now, I know this was published in the eighties and phylogenetic trees of Cetacea weren’t available at the time, but surely it’s not too difficult to look at those two species and realize they’re not even that closely related? And surely it’s not too much to expect a science fiction writer to actually bother to do some basic research into biology - for instance, the fact that mammal-eating orcas don’t vocalize while hunting.

After that colossal mistake, it was all too easy to find other logical holes in the story. The societies of the Uplift universe carefully manage planetary resources, and yet a Terran geologist has access to atomic bombs to facilitate his research; the sexual element of the human-dolphin interactions on ³§³Ù°ù±ð²¹°ì±ð°ù’s crew was redolent of John Lilly’s work; Brin completely failed to explore the patron-client relationship between humans and dolphins, even when there was ample opportunity to do so.

Overall it just� it felt cluttered, incomplete, and flat. Any one or two of its plotlines could have made their own book, but together they were less than the sum of their parts. And while it’s possible that some of my questions were answered in Sundiver, after the disappointment of this book, I’m not inclined to bother reading anything else of Brin’s.