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Old 09-24-2008, 09:16 PM   #23
montsnmags
Grand Sorcerer
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney View Post
...
Cherryh is hit and miss for me. I liked the Chanur series, for instance, but didn't care for some of the others. I'm quite fond of Brin's "Uplift" novels.
...
I've read some of the Uplift novels a while back. Let me just check which ones...

Okay, I've read:

  • Sundiver
  • Startide Rising
  • The Uplift War
  • Brightness Reef


Obviously, having read four, I was enjoying them enough to keep reading. I'd say I read them in 1995, because I'm pretty sure I would have kept reading on to Infinity's Shore if it was available at the time.

However, I can't say I found them in the realm of SF books I've enjoyed the most. I remember feeling that the "alien" races were a bit "Mr Potato Head" (just add different parts together to make a whole), and the big mystery that tracked behind the series reminded me of SF television series that run episodes which are self-contained, but have an ongoing plot behind them ("The truth is out there"). I found that a bit...annoying, as I do with television. I liked the concept of "uplift", but I also got the idea that humanity was almost a "chosen species" (it's been a while, so my memory, always suspect, may be misguiding me), and that probably would have annoyed me too. Note, though, that once one thing starts to annoy, I can completely overlook any subtleties and positive attributes in a book.

The thing is, they were good enough that I read four of them in a row, so they must have been pretty good (I'm a constant reader, but not a voraciously quick "read-five-books-a-week" reader, and so I tend to be fairly selective in what I purchase because I almost never put a book down once started - making a bad decision is going to take too much of my time). I would recommend the Uplift books to friends, if I thought their tastes and preferences in SF were compatible, but I don't have them on my universal SF-recommendation "You should read this!" list.

Going back to my comment about SF television series, the Uplift Universe, and these stories, would, in my opinion, make a brilliant television series, or a series set in the Uplift universe with movies (even "straight to tv"), perhaps, for some or all the books. Start the series with a movie version of Startide Rising?

Cheers,
Marc
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