Remember the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll? It is filled with nonsense words, but if you carefully track the context clues it makes some degree of sense. It is beautiful to roll off the tongue, but a slight strain to the brain as you try to make sense of it.So too is Brightness Reef. I don't know if it was written in Galactic Two or perhaps Galactic Six, but it sure weren't writ in Anglic. It was fun to read about non-bipedal aliens. It was fun to have the story told with their own vocabular...

Lots of good talking points in this return to Brin's Uplift universe: interrogating ideas of humanity and sapience, cultural imperialism, and feminist commentary. But it's just so damn long and unwieldy!

I enjoyed this adventure in the Uplift universe, even though I had to wonder sometimes just what was going on. In an environment where Uplift is a desirable thing, who would choose to sneak onto a forbidden planet and attempt to divest themselves of all the trappings of permanent civilization? And not just one “sneakship,” but half a dozen different races are on Jijo to “return to Eden.” It’s a regular back-to-the-land movement.There are a lot of moving parts--plenty of plots and counter-plots,

This was a hard one to muddle through--it wasn't until I realized that this trilogy is contemporary to the events of the Uplift Trilogy that I started to get interested.Brin is experimenting with perspective--from the alien Asx to the Stranger who has lost all language when introducted to Alvin, the young hoon who tells his story in a first person journal style.Of course, since it's Brin, the intrigue is thick.Gone are the weird time passage "burps" from earlier books. Everything seems to flow n...

This happens to be one of those books that is both brilliant and lacking at the same time. I will explain myself. The novel is actually quite as daunting and impressive as Startide Rising and The Uplift War in it's way, but it's mainly because Brin doesn't ever stint on world building. Ever. He goes all out and develops tons of alien races, tons of characters, and a great many implications for the amazingly complex alien culture among the 16 galaxies. Truly, I have nothing bad to say at all abou...

Spoiler alert: There are no bright reefs in here. Brin has taken two words that he likes, put them together, and named his story that. He then filled up 650 pages with multiple threads of a tale that I'm not all that interested in. This book is at least 3x longer than it needs to be. I can summarize:1) There are various aliens who have come into illegal exile together for various reasons. Their motivations are slowly revealed.2) Their plan is to devolve into pre-sentient lifeforms. By the way, e...

A high four. Some of my favorite things were things that I appreciated in thought more than enjoyed as I read it, but that may be my harshest critique. I sometimes complain that science fiction is so concentrated upon its jawsome ideas that it forgets to also be literature, but the sort of self-aware literary technique in the secondary story line seemed a bit out of place sandwiched between the more conventional sections. Perhaps if the whole book had been written that way it would have worked,

I honestly have to say I found this book hard to read and tiresome in the extreme. I try always to finish any book I start, so I persevered to the end, and was left wondering what the heck it was all about.The basic story is about six refugee alien species hiding on a forbidden planet in fear of being discovered by the galactic superpowers from whom they fled in the first place. I appreciate imagination in inventing aliens, but to me an alien must at least be believable according to the laws of

I used to be a voracious reader, and although I find that my reading time is now taken up by other communication methods (iPad, Internet, etc.) I still enjoy reading a good book, or listening to audiobooks. So, I've gone back and started listening to one of my favorite series of books by David Brin called the Uplift Trilogy. It's really a long story set after the events of Startide Rising, which is the keystone book in his whole Uplift "universe." The short explanation of the story is that human...

I read the first three Uplift novels back when they were fairly new, and since then they've been one of my favorite brainy space opera series. Recently I marathoned through the initial trilogy again and was pleased to discover there were three more books in the series since then.The Uplift books are a great mix of adventure, world-building, and scientific speculation, and the alien races portrayed in these books are especially great. "Brightness Reef" took me a little longer to get into compared...

Storyline: 4/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 5/5Asx, qheuens, traeki, khuta, Hph-wayou, hoonish, Jijo, Zang, Izmuti, g'Keks, glavers, the Great Buyur, Alvin, Mister Heinz, Guenn Volcano, Terminus Rock, Joe Dolenz, Mu-phauwq, Yowg-wayou, humicker, Huck, Becky, Pincer-Tip, wrigglers, Ur-ronn, urs, Uriel, Mount Guenn, urrish, uttergloss, Drake, Ur-jushen, Holy Egg, er, hoon, Biblos, Aph-awn, Ur-Tanj, noor, Wuphon, mulc-spiders, Uncle Lorben, Sixers, Ifni, gingourv trees, hoonlike, garu, um...

DNF. The writing is technically brilliant and the world building is exquisite, but I could care less about the characters in the story. Too many names, too little time. Individually, each of these storylines could be really good, but aren't allowed enough time to breathe, and I got confused trying to follow them.

You cannot ask for a better premise than Uplift. Of all the science fiction series I've read, David Brin has something special here. Uplift is more than just panspermia, because Brin has taken the idea of aliens genetically engineering pre-sapient life to full sapience and wrapped his own entire mythos around the concept. As a result of Uplift, galactic civilization is a network of intricate social relationships defined and bound by literally millions of years of tradition. Client races are beho...

Six sentient species live together secretly in hard-won harmony on the planet Jijo, which the almighty Galactics have decreed to be left unsettled. All goes well until their discovery by a starship crewed by humans with a mysterious purpose throws everything into chaos and uncertainty.David Brin is telling a big story here. The planet and the various alien cultures upon it are meticulously detailed and his concept of Uplift, whereby races achieve sentience and admittance to a heavily stratified

I've read most of David Brin's Uplift Universe, but I actually started with this particular series, and despite it being the final trilogy, I can say with confidence that it's a mighty fine place to start. To this day these three books remain my favorite Brin novels.Not only is David Brin an absolute master of Hard Science Fiction, his work is a good antidote to the pile of young-adult-inspired-barely-feasible-dystopias that are currently flooding the market and trying to coattail on the success...

Not sure why i keep at theses Uplift books. I dont by the setup - I am not overwhelmed by any ideas in the story, the setting, the premise, etc...They arent bad, they just dont do much for me. I find it hard to imagine people taking species responsibility over the course of thousands of years. It is hard to get most people who study a specific thing - to agree what happened 100 years ago. So to think we or any like species would carry any guilt for thousands of years seems unlikely.For this part...

Jeez. Did not get any of that. It's weird how these Uplift books jump up and down in quality and feel. Maybe just for me personally.Here we have 6 totally different alien species cohabiting a world, but none of them really feel different and it was just all a jumble. I couldn't really relate to any of them as characters, nor even really paint as pictures in my head. And they kinda were not doing much as well, maybe mildly starting to get to something interesting, but then the book ended and noth...

This book is really *slow*, like the one in the anecdote where nothing happens for three hundred pages and then someone else's aunt dies? Yes, that kind of book, except here it was like *five* hundred pages.Overall this book tells a story that could have been condensed down to two hundred pages and not lose much if anything, but takes almost seven hundred pages to do it. I liked the original Uplift trilogy very much, but I don't think I will be reading the other two books in this one. Usually I

This is a good book.the 6 different species on the planet Jijo are well created and interesting. There was lucklily a picture at the end of the book and after looking at that I understood the shape and parts of the different types of aliens there. There is also an interesting idea of 'Patron' species. In other words a species that takes another fledgling group and begins to uplift them. Genetically changing them slowly as well as teaching them things to make them into the next star-faring specie...

These are getting better, though the author still has some writing quirks that annoy me. These last three Uplift books are apparently all one long story. The first one, Brightness Reef, introduces us to the planet Jijo, and to the six erstwhile starfaring races that dwell there in exile illegally. Some of the storylines and characters are quite captivating, like that of Rety and of the Stranger. Others like Alvin, Huck and friends, I wish to get through quickly and move on. He has learned to go