(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

With Heaven’s Reach (1998), David Brin concludes his ‘Uplift Storm’ Trilogy. This series, the earlier segments of which are Brightness Reef (1995) and Infinity’s Shore (1996), comes to over 1800 pages; and yet it is merely a sequel to an earlier Uplift Trilogy, made up of Sundiver (1980), Startide Rising (1983), and The Uplift War (1987). Such literary voluminousness requires justification; and, fortunately, Brin provides it. Although he is stylistically slapdash at times, prone to careless inconsistencies and gross improbabilities of plot, and sentimentally over-optimistic about humanity’s potential, Brin has one unfailing gift: absolute command of narrative excitement. Because of this, the ‘Uplift’ books are exuberant torrents of story, some of the greatest SF adventure novels ever published. They are pure, heedless Grand Space Opera.

In the first trilogy, Brin developed a scenario of induced evolution. For billions of years, our galaxy and others have witnessed a culture of Uplift: older species guide younger ones to full civilized sentience. Elaborate conventions govern this; and the human race, newly arrived on the galactic scene and curiously lacking any Patrons of its own, quickly joins the game, uplifting dolphins and chimps to full intelligence. Predatory alien clans detest humanity; Earth is militarily besieged when a dolphin spaceship, Streaker, uncovers ancient secrets that threaten cosmic stability. The books feature spectacular episodes in this ongoing conflict, as humans duck and bamboozle their comically fanatical enemies. At the first trilogy’s end, many issues awaited resolution: the war, Streaker’s fate, the ultimate origin, rationale, and destiny of the Uplift creed. Yet curiously, Brin chose in Brightness Reef to move from cosmic pandaemonium to quiet pastoral: Jijo, an isolated low-technology world, where human and alien refugees have constructed a novel, ecologically responsible, harmonious civilization. In the details of this, the series lags for a while, suffering a near-fatal loss of its characteristic breakneck momentum; but in Infinity’s Shore, the old pace is regained, as the Uplift War reaches Jijo, and Streaker reappears. In Heaven’s Reach, all space opera’s gaudy panoply is displayed again, as the scene shifts once more to galactic starways and cosmic battlefields.

Like the best earlier Uplift novel, Startide Rising (which won Hugo and Nebula Awards), Heaven’s Reach is breathlessly paced, delivering a remorseless avalanche of frantic combats, vast perspectives, bizarre ploys and escapes, colourful aliens, and sudden disorienting revelations, all spiced with self-deprecating humour, ironic improbability, and precarious slapstick. Brin demonstrates again his fecund narrative craftiness, as the sundry protagonists of the previous volumes, crewing Streaker, now encounter, successively, gigantic hydrogen-breathing aliens, a huge Dyson Sphere or star-surrounding habitat containing trillions of retired elder entities (soon totally demolished), and a neutron star where godlike beings prepare to catapult emissary vessels to galaxies billions of light-years distant. In a subplot, a sentient chimpanzee explores a hyperspace realm inhabited by pure ideas. All of this leads up to a climactic crisis, a Great Rupture that brings a liberating Time of Changes to the galaxies of the Uplift civilization. In the currency of spectacular crazed grandeur, Heaven’s Reach is a munificent offering. And yet: the story isn’t over yet, as many enigmas remain…

It is possible to feel cheated by this absence of closure. And cheated also by certain lazy textual inattentivenesses on Brin’s part. But momentum is everything in pure space opera, and in that, Heaven’s Reach is unfailing.

ORBIT (UK). 1998. HARDCOVER.