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I'm always looking for media featuring aliens, especially multiple races. Came across this on TvTropes. Seems to dismiss the first book and say its unneeded. Anyone here enjoy/hate this one? Any starting point you'd recommend? Most importantly how prominent are the aliens?
The premise is really cool which is what interested me enough to read the first book (Startide Rising) which I enjoyed.
Future human race is entering a galactic civilization, where all the space-faring species were “uplifted” by a previous space-faring race. Uplifting essentially means educating, breeding, and enhancing species to the point of our intelligence. Humans in this universe have done this to dolphins and great apes. The other alien species in the series looks down on humans as no one knows who or even if humans were uplifted. The main characters in Startide Rising were humans, dolphins and one chimpanzee, all on a spaceship crashed on an alien world.
I would suggest at least giving the series a shot.
“Wolflings” (was it wildlings?) is the slang term for species that were abandoned by their patrons.
There’s a few things going on there. First, galactic society is very much built on the concept of order and prestige. Old races gain more power and influence by uplifting younger ones. (And the younger ones serve the uplifters in return.)
Galactic society is very heavily structured with very explicit rules of conduct (including requiring that species move on every so often from settled worlds; to allow new species to evolve)
Wolflings tend to be brash and not well mannered; as well problematic.
IIRC, there was a level of rights granted to a species that uplifted 3 other species, making humans special, because they did 2 without the resources or knowledge of patrons. A third uplifted species (the gorillas, in point of fact, or rather the ‘rillas’) would have created extensive political turmoil.
I think the rank was that indentured were newly uplifted and served their patron race for a number of generations. When a race you uplifted became a patron race by uplifting another race you're race became a senior patron race. Senior patron races had the most power and respect.
Humanity either not having a patron or having been abandon by it's patron would have been made a indentured race to a patron. Except we had uplifted chimps and dolphins putting us into patron status as soon as we entered galactic society.
This line jumping made us disliked by most other races. We also tended to be more like partners with or uplifted races instead of treating them like inferiors. Which made a lot of other races nervous their indentured races might start wanting the same.
Client species are indentured for 100,000 years, in exchange for being uplifted; they used hyperspace shunts as a sort of testing ground for sentience; with the ministry of uplift or whatever it was overseeing things.
If patron species were able to be embarrassed or abused the client species, they could be freed from that (which was the motivations of the Pring in sub diver; discrediting the Pila meant being able to get freedom,)
Humans didn’t have that rule or mindset when they uplifted dolphins and chimps; since it was still before contact with galactic society; it wasn’t until space flight that we found out about any of that.
It’s also important to note that humans were odd and contrary to galactic norms; being Wolfings, we bootstrapped our selves into space.
Which was a defining technology for GalCic- unlike literally any other species, we sought to understand what we used and tended to avoid using things we didn’t understand.
A central belief is that everything has already been invented; so why bother. This meant everything was recycled tech; with races finding ancient tech in the library and using that instead of designing new.
This made humans unpredictable, in a society that highly valued order.
Having 2 clients as well, meant a 3rd would give an incredibly young, utterly unpredictable race highly influential standing politically and socially. (It’s probably best to consider patron/clients as a cast system;)
Humans- and earthclan in general- were not liked simply because the galaxy did not like change. It had been stagnant for hundreds of thousands of millennia.