Month 16: A banana and a beer

Month 16 of 260 (6.15 percent)

Size of list: 82,256 pages (5.8 percent greater than starting size, unchanged for three months)

Pages read: 8,796 (10.69 percent)

H-list: 2,793/22,674 (12.32 percent)

N-list: 2,850/36,116 (7.89 percent)

O-list: 3,153/23,466 (13.44 percent)

Finished: The Uplift War

Reading: The Dragon Reborn

The only book I finished this month was The Uplift War, the 1988 Hugo winner and a direct sequel to Startide Rising, which I read last year. But I mean it's a direct sequel in that it's more of a sequel than Startide Rising was to Sundiver, nominally the first book in the Uplift Trilogy. The Uplift War shares none of the same characters or even the same planets, but what happens in this book is caused by what happens in the previous.

The Uplift War features chimpanzees as an uplifted species, and pits them against the Gubru, an avian race that has invaded Garth, the planet that is the setting of this story. (An aside: I used to have an old Mac game, the kind where you send spaceships from one planet to another and they fight when they arrive, and it pit the player as humans against two races: the Kzin and the Gubru. I had never known where the Gubru came from before reading this.) A few other characters are human and Tymbrini, another alien species. 

The best part of this book is the Gubru. David Brin succeeds in making a race feel alien while still comprehensible to the human reader. The other alien species are interesting too, and life as an uplifted chimpanzee was wonderful to read about.

When I got to about 100 pages to go, as the climax was coming, and chimpanzees were walking up a hill taking tests, I couldn't put it down. It was an excellent climax.

Brin wrote another whole Uplift Trilogy, which isn't on my list at all, but I may throw the next book on if I'm in the mood.