Startide Rising
David Brin: “Startide Rising” (1983) This is a sci fi story about a Terran (Earth) crew of neo-dolphins and humans on the starship “The Streaker”. Their mission is to find information about the first Galactic race, which existed billions of yeas ago. The neo-dolphins are dolphins which have gone through the "Uplift" process, which creates through genetic engineering more intelligent sentient beings. For the neo-dolphins, this is also a test of their ability to apply their intelligence, knowledge and skills to Galactic space travel and exploration. The Terrans find an ancient fleet of starships, and on a nearby planet, an ancient (human?) skeleton. There are other Galactic races, who are also keen to find information about the first Galactic civilization. Their hot pursuit of the Terrans forces “The Streaker” to land on the planet Kithrup, whose watery environment and atmosphere are similar to Earth. Above the planet, the starships of the other Galactic races fight each other. On Kithrup, the dolphins and humans begin repairs to the Streaker, and to explore the ocean, and the inland area of their landing site. They discover an aboriginal species living amongst the trees and lakes inland. There is evidence that there has been another Galactic race on the planet in the very distant past. Within the crew of the Streaker, tensions and conflicts develop on how to escape from Kithrup.
Stats for nerds
13recommend
19mentions
16people
2009–2026years
74% recommend26% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Blindsight by Peter Watts
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Startide Rising by David Brin
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The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.
- This was the most fascinating thing about David Brin's "Startide Rising". And I never forgot that book in my life.
- This is one of several books I read in the 90s that I still think about and love so much. Startide Rising and Downbelow Station are the other ones that immediately springs to mind.
This book (and Startide Rising) are very much in the space opera camp. There's really no basis in physics for the zones in this book but I really love the ideas. I love the Tines. I also love the idea of the arms race that was unwittingly started on this world.
If you like the theme of sudden technological advance, I highly recommend CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series. They're sets of trilogies and I think it's up to ~15 books now? This series is set in the same world as Downbelow Station (tangentially). The central premise is that FTL jumping is possible but difficult. In this series, a group of would-be colonists awake from jump sleep to find they have no idea where they've jumped to. They can't get any star bearings and they end up ultimately settling on a world that has an alien species on it that technologically is around the 19th century. It's not a fast-paced series but I love the thoughtfulness and introspection of it.
- David Brin, Uplift Universe. Start with Startide rising. It covers this in a more interestingly ethical way I think.
- A hacky python wrapper around bluetoothctl that lets me use aliases as addresses. So I can write `connect {niss}` to connect my phone instead of `connect 12:6a:78:c2:74:d5 (ref. to one of childhood favorite books, Startide Rising).
The script then runs "devices", looks for an alias "niss", and substitutes in the corresponding address. I use expect in Python to script it all together.
- I find any conversation about dolphins and science fiction that neglects David Brin's "Startide Rising" [1] to be criminally negligent. It was even published in the Cold War (1983). Such a wonderful book if you haven't read it.
