Sundiver

This is astrophysicist David Brin's first novel, and it is part hard SF and part mystery (murder and otherwise). A good deal of time is spent introducing a portion of his Uplift setting, explored further in his second (and much awarded) book. I liked it.

The author's background (he was also a NASA consultant) comes through in some fascinating hardware for "diving" towards the surface of the sun and coming safely home again. Outside the basic tech, Brin relies on "galactic tech" to take care of other things, such as artificial gravity.

Of what we learn about the extraterrestrial races, I love the idea of the galactic library. Another clever idea are the magnetovores, grazing the magnetic waves on our sun. And of course the basic idea of uplift is pretty cool, from raunchy dolphins to wisecracking chimpanzees.

First published in 1980, this is the kind of science fiction I read in my youth, though I missed this one at the time. This is also a very quick read. A solid 3½ stars.

Sundiver is the first of David Brin's Uplift novels. Even though it's clearly science fiction, it's in many ways more of a whodunnit detective story than science fiction. The main protagonist, Jacob Demwa, is a regular Sherlock Holmes; he has a reputable background and glorious hero stature, with abilities matching his reputation.

As other reviewers have pointed out, even though Sundiver was written in 1980, it has aged well: there are some mentions of, for example, storage technology, that seem outdated, but on the whole, the technology used by mankind is still mostly science fiction. This is even more true when it comes to alien tech, which is suitably vaguely described to probably remain fresh far into foreseeable future. I was particularly glad to notice this since the last book I read was [book:Foundation|29579][book:Foundation|29579][book:Foundation|29579], which - even if it is a lot older book - was badly hampered by the archaic technology used by supposedly advanced cultures.

Sundiver has interesting ideas, starting from the idea of uplifting itself - and the chain of uplifts that is the basis of the whole galactic culture in the series. Finding life in the Sun is central to the plot, but it's also put on back burner for long stretches, while there's some serious detectivation going on. Jacob is clearly the central figure in the story, and other characters are left even annoyingly shallow.

I enjoyed the book a lot. At the same time, while reading the book, I had a nagging feeling I've read it before. I'm now fairly certain I've read at least most of the book less than ten years ago, but I had only vague recollections that came to my mind while reading it now. Sundiver seems enjoyable, but not memorable.