Heaven's Reach

By David Brin

The third novel of the second Uplift trilogy in which the Streaker leaves Jijo and attempts to outrun the Jophur in order to reach the Retired Races and turn their information over to what they hope will be an impartial party. This information is why the Jophur and other races have been trying so hard to capture the Streaker. They think it will reveal hard truths about the universe and its ultimate fate.
But when the Streaker arrives at a star around which is a settlement of the Retired Races, it is to only find calamity. The Retired Races are up in arms, battling against each other and their entire gigantic settlement is breaking apart and falling into the star. Some factions of the Retired want the vital data on board the Streaker but others want the Streaker to continue on. Those ones give Streaker a just enough help to enable them to stay one step ahead of the Jophur vessel.
The Jophur are having problems too. Their vessel has been attacked and invaded by the Zang, a hydrogen life form. What their agenda is is not known. Encountering two human prisoners of the Jophur, the Zang envelope the two and make them part of their community, with a peaceful exchange of ideas.
Meanwhile, something is seriously wrong with the universe, as transfer points become unreliable and dysfunctional. Apparently the disaster is upon them all and chaos is descending.  Who will survive?

This was an OK read. I was sorry to see the story leave the interesting peoples of Jijo. I would have liked to read more about them. But this story is set in space, as the Streaker tries to stay out of the clutches of the Jophur and the universe has its own ideas. It was an interesting story, though, despite the change of locale.

Infinity's Shore

By David Brin

The second book of the second Uplift Trilogy.

The squatter races of Jijo face more danger as a huge Jophur vessel arrives, searching for the dophin-piloted, Earthling space ship, Streaker. The Jophur entomb the Rothen ship and start interrogating the locals as to the location of the Streaker. The traeki, Asx, is captured by the Jophur and converted to one of them with the application of a master ring and is now known as Ewasx. Ewasx  maintains control over the traeki rings that composed Asx through applications of pain and uses Asx's knowledge of the locals to benefit the Jophur.
Meanwhile the Streaker is still hiding on the ocean floor, trying to remove the heavy crust that enveloped their ship as it passed through the Jijo sun's field. This crust makes the ship too heavy and the crew is trying everything they can think of to remove it.
The group of four youngsters who went forth in a wooden sub to study the ocean floor are rescued by the crew of the Streaker but are held captive, since the Streaker folks don't want the locals to know they are on Jijo.
Meanwhile, back on land, Jijo society is in meltdown and under assault by the Jophur who think they can wring the location the of the Streaker out of the locals. But the fact is that the locals don't know anything about the Streaker. The Jophur think they are being deceptive and punish them by destroying some of their towns, In particular, they go after the g'Kek, who the Jophur obliterated from the known universe and who the Jophur hate even more than they hate Earthlings.
Despite their lack of sophisticated technology, the locals are not going down without a fight and they make some surprising inroads against the Jophur. Meanwhile, on the Streaker, they realize if they don't get off Jijo, then everything the Jijoans have built will be ruined by the Jophur and those who come after them.

This was a pretty good story, lots of stuff going on, lots of action and heroics as the most of the locals band together to stand against the Jophur.  Also interesting was the crew of the Streaker's disbelief that the various races on Jijo could have developed such a peaceful and productive society. Gradually they come to understand how things are and how their presence on Jijo in endangering it all. Sometimes it was hard to keep all the characters straight, with all the story lines to keep in mind, but fortunately the book includes a cast of characters.

Brightness Reef

By David Brin

Book One of Brin's new uplift trilogy.
The planet Jijo used to be inhabited by the Buyur, but they left it long ago and now it is set aside, a forbidden world, not to be colonized, allowed to go fallow. But nonetheless, six groups of refugees, human and nonhuman, have snuck onto Jijo and are living together, in cooperation, trying their best to minimize their impact on the environment and creatures of Jijo. And also trying to hide from the galactic authorities. So when a ship lands on Jijo, the squatters, or sooners as they are called in the book, are sure they are in deep trouble.
Everyone is thrown into turmoil. Some want everything destroyed. Some think all should flee into the wilderness. Some want to just wait and see what will happen next. Beings are frightened and old antagonisms reappear. But wait! This ship is not from the authorities. It is a bunch of criminals, come to Jijo to raid the planet for lifeforms. But is this any better? Perhaps not because criminals don't like to leave any witnesses to their crimes!

This first entry in the new trilogy seems to go off into a dozen different directions. There are five different ETs living on Jijo, plus the humans. So not only does the reader have to keep track of all these characters, you also have to keep in mind their species too. There is the traeki, a pharmacist called Asx. The traeki are a peaceful version of the fanatical Jophur. There is the mixed group of juveniles, Alvin, Huck, Ur-ronn, Pincer-tip, who are building a submersible to explore the sea bottom. There are the three adult children of a human paper maker, Sara, Lark and Dwer, who each have their plot line to follow. Sara is taking the injured, off-world human who was found wandering in a swamp to the people from the spaceship. Lark is helping one of the spaceship people in a survey trek of the area. And Dwer is leading a small group of humans to the back country, hopefully to survive whatever the spaceship people may be planning to cover their tracks. Plus there are the spaceship people and there is the group at the Holy Egg to keep track of and there is a back country girl, Rety, who has joined the ship people for a chance to get off Jijo. There is a lot going on in this story, so much so that at times I felt kind of lost and bewildered.  It was just too much to keep track of!
But despite the confusion, I still enjoyed the book quite a lot. And I am looking forward to the next in the trilogy, Infinity's Shore.

The Practice Effect

By David Brin

Dennis Nuel was the genius behind the zievatron, a machine that opened a portal to an alternate universe, but he got pushed out of the research project and sidelined. So he was thrilled to be offered a chance to rejoin the team. But there was a catch...he would be obliged to enter the zievatron and allow himself to be transported to an unknown world, a world from which he may never be able to return.
When he exited the zievatron and onto the strange planet, he immediately discovered why the return mechanism had stopped functioning. It had been hacked to pieces. Before much longer Dennis discovered that the locals were humans who even spoke English. But their technology was at a stone age level and they regarded Dennis as a kind of wizard and he soon found himself in thrall to the local warlord who wanted him to create powerful weapons like the gun they confiscated from Dennis.

This was a fun story. Dennis soon figures out that the physics of this strange place are very different and quickly manages to use it to his advantage, winning his freedom from the tyrant and rescuing the beautiful princess in the process. He and his friends, including a strange little animal, a robot, the princess and a thief, have lots of adventures and Dennis uses his superior knowledge to create devices, that, with the strange local physics, enable them to rescue themselves from peril from the bad guys who are anxious to capture their escaped wizard. It was quite an enjoyable read.

The Uplift War

By David Brin

Garth is a planet that was abused greatly by its previous tenants has been granted to humans and neochimps to colonize. Their mission is to provide a home for a growing colony of neochimps and to restore and bring into balance the planet's ecology. It's just too bad they end up as pawns in an interstellar conflict.
Although the humans and neochimps put up a gallant defense against the Gubru invaders, they are out-gunned and out-numbered and soon the Gubru are ruling the roost, literally. (Gubru are bird-like beings who like being on a perch.) Their purpose in seizing Garth is to blackmail Earth into doing what the Gubru want. Failing that, they will use the inhabitants of Garth to prove that humans don't deserve to be Galactic citizens and that humans should be indentured to a more advanced, superior race, like the Gubru. Also that humans are botching the Uplift (genetic engineering) of chimps to neochimps and that someone more qualified should take over the neochimps' Uplift. Someone like, oh, I don't know, maybe...the Gubru?
Well, the Gubru might think they are an advanced Galactic culture, but basically they are out to get whatever they can. And if it means gassing humans and destroying forests and imprisoning and brainwashing neochimps and holding entire worlds hostage, well, that's just too bad. The Gubru may look like a flock of birdbrains but they are a ruthless bunch of intergalactic baddies.

This was an OK story. It was too long and slow, I thought. The romance between one of the main characters and an alien girl was not very satisfying and also kind of disturbing. The neochimps came off as too human. And I never did understand the whole thing about the gorillas coming into the Gubru-controlled town and crashing some ceremony intended to raise neochimps to Galactic citizenhood. And, strangely enough, even though the Gubru are stinkers, I felt sorry for the way it turned out for them in the end. It felt like a real lost opportunity for something wonderful and magnificent.

Startide Rising

By David Brin

Some time after humans have achieved starflight and become a rather unwelcome part of the galactic community, an experimental mission consisting of a crew of a few humans but mostly "uplifted" dolphins sets out on a shakedown flight that ends up turning the whole galaxy on its ear.
First, the galactic community, consisting of many different intelligent species, has existed for millions of years. They have pooled their knowledge into a vast Library which they share among themselves.
The origins of this community are pretty much unknown, but the common mythology is that a race of intelligent Progenitors established the Library, started the process of "uplift" and developed the galactic culture and community and then disappeared. Consequently, a fundamentalist-type of religion has developed in the galaxy that maintains that someday the Progenitors will return and establish a new, perfect community and reward the true believers.
"Uplift" is the process whereby an intelligent species takes a species that is just verging on becoming self-aware, and using genetic manipulation, push it into intelligence and then the uplifted ones spend a long time, maybe thousands of years, as servants and slaves of the species that uplifted them.
Uplift is the main reason that humans are not liked in the galactic community, because humans developed intelligence on their own and are not beholden to anyone. Plus humans uplifted some Earth species and did not make them slaves or servants to humanity, namely chimps and dolphins. This the galactic community finds outrageous because it flaunts millions of years of tradition.
So when this spaceship of humans, a chimp, and mostly dolphins discovers a graveyard in space of huge, moon-sized spaceships, the galactics, believing that the spaceships are those of the Progenitors and herald the beginning of the return of the Progenitors, will do anything to get their paws, flippers, tentacles, whatever on the location of this graveyard. The little spaceship becomes a target and gets shot down on a water world and its combined crew is in for a fight to the death to not only save their own lives but to protect the hugely valuable information that all their many enemies are dying to possess.

This is an ingenious and interesting story about a most unlikely situation, namely a spaceship crewed by a bunch of dolphins and that spaceship in turn trying to face down an armada of enemy ships determined to possess it. It was an exciting and intriguing read and I enjoyed it a lot. The only quibbles I had with the story were the dolphins, which I thought seemed too human in their behaviour, and the religious fanaticism of the galactics, which came off as too primitive for such supposedly highly advanced species. But other than that, it was a very enjoyable read.

Kiln People

By David Brin

What if you could send a copy of yourself off to work every day while you stayed home and enjoyed yourself? Or make a copy to do the housework or mow the lawn or go to school and take your exams? Imagine if you never had to spend time doing all the boring yet necessary stuff that clutters up your life! Instead you just let your copy handle it and you can spend your precious time doing the things you really want not the things you have to do. That is the basis Kiln People.
The story revolves around Albert Morris who lives in a world where people make cheap, clay copies of themselves, called dittos or golems, to handle all the boring tasks of life while they sit back and play. Albert is a "ditective," a detective who specializes in tracking down criminals who copy other people's dittos, a copyright infringement. Albert is on the trail of Beta, a ditto bootlegger he has been trying to run down for some time. He has also been hired to investigate the murder of the inventor of the ditto process.

I started out really liking this story. The whole concept the ditto people is such a cool idea. The future society that Brin depicts is complicated and fascinating and very strange. The story swings between Albert and two of his copies who are helping him solve the case, which was fun to read. But then towards the end of the story, Brin gets too repetitive in retelling the story from the different view points. I didn't care for the trip into transcendence and really didn't care for the cavalier way Brin just dismisses life after death. (According to him, our souls when we die try to reach transcendence but fail.) Also I just didn't get the ending, which I found confusing and ambiguous.
Overall, I would say, despite the problems I had with the novel, it is worth reading because Brin's golems are such an appealing idea and because it is an engaging look at a future society.

Review by Steven Silver:   https://www.sfsite.com/~silverag/kiln.html.