I got these two books at Christmas having remembered enjoying the
earlier books in the Uplift Series (
Sundiver,
Startide Rising and
The Uplift War). It turned out I had read them before but simply
hadn’t remembered; not a great sign.
I realised right away when I started reading
Brightness Reef
that I had read it before. I jumped past it as it all came back
to me and started on
Infinity's Shore. This one, I wasn’t so sure
about, initially, but, I had read this as well. It simply wasn’t
as memorable as the other books in the series but I went ahead and read
it. The problem, basically is that the story is getting tired;
there are two many characters having disparate adventures for you to
get emotionally involved with most of them. I’ll give the last in
the series (
Heaven's Reach) a miss. I still can’t remember
whether I have read it.
The Uplift Series is a great series, though, and the first three books
were excellent. The basic premise is that there is a galactic
civilisation over a billion years old that is made up of many sapient
species. No species has become sapient without the help of a
pre-existing patron race since the legendary Progenitors, until
humanity arrives on the scene. The arrival of this “wolfling
race” causes ructions in the galactic civilisation and a human and
dolphin crewed explorer ship is caught up in various situations.
There are some great ideas here and the start of the series gets
carried along by those. The characters start to get a bit stale
in the second half of the series and it seems a bit like its just been
tacked on. They are OK reads, but not great.