Bookshelf
Just started- King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard
Just finished- Brightness Reef, David Brin This is a well written piece of sci fi, with interesting aliens and a strange but logically ordered culture and neat shifts in emphasis to show which story thread you’re in. But I have some pretty major problems with it. For one thing, it’s part one of a trilogy. I’m not one of life’s trilogy readers , and by half way through the book, it wasobvious that everyone was settling in for the long run.
The other big problem is the whole premise of ‘Uplift’, the phenomenon that links all the races in the book. Uplift is the process whereby super intelligent, glory motivated aliens take a race on the verge of sentience and nudge it along until it can form societies and reach for the stars. They have to do this, you see, because evolution alone cannot possibly result in such intelligence. This looks to me like nothing more than dressed up Intelligent Design, itself a dubious attempt to wrap Creationism up in pseudoscience so that it can be taught in schools.