David Brin
Sundiver (1980)
Uplift #1
Reviewed: 1996-08-19

There are several facets to this book. It introduces us to the Uplift universe, it is a mystery novel, the main protagonist must overcome his schizophrenia, and a large part of it is set, of all unlikely places, in the chromosphere of our sun. Let's look at each of these in turn:

"Uplifting" designates the act of a star-faring civilization nuturing a primitive, semi-intelligent species to full sentience and eventually bestowing on it the gift of an advanced technology. When the first human explorers set out to other solar systems they quickly learned that we are not alone. The galaxy is teeming with other civilizations. All but the youngest of them have already uplifted new races they discovered, and all of them were once uplifted themselves by older civilizations, of which the most ancient have disappeared long since. Humanity alone seems to have developed without the intervention of a parent civilization and has managed to struggle to the stars without an inheritence of millions of years worth of collected knowledge. And with dolphins and chimps, man has already uplifted two species on his own, earning some forced recognition in a galactic society where status is derived from the age of a civilization and its descendance tree of uplifted races.

Sundiver succeeds as a mystery novel. There is a lot of intrigue, the book is sufficiently well plotted and paced, and there is no cheating with the detective gathering off-page information. You as the reader may not be likely to figure it all out by yourself, but the clues are there, ranging from the very subtle to the obvious that some things are not as they seem to be.

The main protagonist, Jacob Demwa, must not only solve a mystery case involving a murder, the future of an important scientific project, and the exorcism of a star (well, kind of), but also come to terms with the schizophrenia he has been suffering from since a traumatic event in his past, involving the death of his wife. I found this aspect of the book of comparatively little interest. It is hard to care about Demwa's personal life when there is so much more at stake. The characterization, which is a weaker part of the novel, is at its forte when Demwa gets his chance to fall in love again. Quite lovely.

As the title suggests, a central component of the book are the dives into the Sun. Yes! Spaceships exploring the chromosphere of Sol. Brin's description of these fiery depths of hell as a landscape of sheer beauty is as unexpected as impressive. Utterly alien in its consuming heat, but at the same time very intimate to the creatures of Terra that draw their very existence from it, Sol is cause for both life and death.

The various aliens populating Sundiver are standard SF issue. Brin wavers between hard SF and invoking genre-typical magic in the form of the Galactics' super technology. The Uplift concept and the resulting galactic meta-society have a lot of consequences which become more interesting as Brin keeps fleshing them out in the novel. There is plenty of material left for further stories in this universe.


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