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Millennia ago the Five Galaxies decreed the planet Jijo off limits. But in the last thousand years six races have begun resettling Jijo, embracing a pre-industrial life to hide their existence from the Galactics. Overcoming their differences, the Six have built a society based on mutual tolerance for one another and respect for the planet they live on. But that has all changed with an event the Six have feared for hundreds of years: the arrival of an outside ship. Author David Brin has returned to his popular Uplift universe in this, the first book of a new trilogy.
Product Details
| Publisher | Spectra |
| ISBN | 0553573306 |
| Features |
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| Format | Mass Market Paperback |
| Author | David Brin |
| EAN | 9780553573305 |
| Label | Spectra |
| Edition | 7th THUS |
| Dewey Decimal Number | 813.54 |
| Studio | Spectra |
| Number Of Pages | 688 |
| Title | Brightness Reef (The Uplift Trilogy, Book 1) |
| Release Date | 1996-10-01 |
| Publication Date | 1996-10-01 |
| Manufacturer | Spectra |
Customer Reviews
Poor-quality kindle editionsReview by L. Voss, 2010-09-06
Important note for buyers: I loved this book, but if you're interested in this book, do not buy the Kindle edition.
I bought most of the Uplift series in Kindle editions: Heaven's Reach, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, Sundiver, and Startide Rising. I was extremely disappointed by the quality of these ebooks. Words were frequently mis-spelled or replaced with similar-looking but incorrect words; words and whole passages were arbitrarily italicized; many words were split with hyphens for no reason. It was confusing, distracting, and eventually irritating. I got the strong impression that all these books had been run rapidly through an OCR system and never checked for correctness or quality. For a publishing company of Ballantine's size and reputation this is ridiculous.
If Ballantine are going to sell ebooks, they should do it properly, and give them the same care and attention they would to physical books. There's no excuse for releasing shoddy digital products.
Many Many Typos in Kindle Edition
Review by R. Duncan, 2010-08-20
The Uplift books are great - on paper. The Kindle Editions have a shameful number of typos. I suspect they were turned into Kindle editions with OCR and nobody even looked at them before they were posted for sale. Brightness Reef is particularly bad, with typos on every page. Some of the sentences are so battered that a person who never read the paper copies would have trouble figuring out what they said. Also - No table of contents! Ridiculous.
Adding Injury to Insult
Review by J. Brittain, 2010-08-09
**** If this review were "published" by Specta it would read like this:****
First, to be clear, this his a review of the Kindle Edition published by Spectra. It hurts me to write this rearview because the author and this navel do not deserve a one out of five stares. The publisher, Spectra, on the other hend has committed @ fraud on the consumers and has insulated the author.
**** Enough!****
David Brin's ability to invoke an enticing and immersive cast and plot is well known. What the publisher has done is pass off a "digital" copy that looks like it was published by scanning the novel and then using circa 2000 OCR software (my apologies to the software companies, they don't deserve the comparison) to create this "digital" version.
I am not a grammarian, and I'm writing this review in Word so it's spell checked, and yet with all my shortcomings in this area I STILL find the errors disrupting to the flow of the novel and for the first time since Nov '07 find myself regretting getting a book on my Kindle.
Brin's Uplift universe is one of my all-time favorites and with the exception of Sundiver, I have purchased each novel as they were published. When I saw there was going to be a Kindle edition I was thrilled to bring the series into my digital library. Now I find myself wondering what the last two books in the series will look like.....
These are the times we live in perplexing harmony
Review by Michael Battaglia, 2009-01-15
Quite some time ago, David Brin wrote a neat series of books involving his fictional galaxy(ies), putting into play a number of interesting alien races and a plausible future history that managed to be both compelling and realistic and mythical. In those books we learned that races, in order to be become sentinent, have to be sponsored and uplifted by another race and in doing so are ready to join the larger galactic community. Of course, plucky humans come along and spoil it by essentially jumping the chain and becoming uplifted without the proper channels, barging right into everything as they so often do.
The first series of Uplift novels (comprising "Sundiver", "Startide Rising" and "The Uplift War") were linked themetically but didn't really form a single plotline, in fact at the time I read them I remember being very annoyed that the intriguing thread involving the ship and crew from "Startide Rising" basically discovering something they shouldn't have and making a break for it wasn't picked up in "The Uplift War" except for very tangentially (ie they're still running for it at the end). Time passed, both between Brin writing new books and me getting around to reading them. So here we are, at the start of the new trilogy.
My advice: brush up. Seriously.
I read the first series probably when I was in college, which is not in the Dark Ages but probably a good seven or eight years ago, at best. But a good background in what's gone before will probably help you a great deal here. Not at first becausre the initial setup is that a handful of races have been living on isolated/off-limits planet Jijo for a number of years, in secret. Everything has been going pretty swell, until the rest of the galaxy figures it out and decides to show up. Things quickly become very complicated as the colonists have to figure out whether the newcomers are there to punish or study them while the new arrivals find there are bigger issues to worry about. Oh, and did I fail to mention that there's like ten alien races all with different mannerisms and points of view all sprinkled throughout the novel?
The fact that Brin makes this work at all speaks to how underrated a writer he is. He switches points of view often, going from race to race and manages the neat trick of being able to convey a character as alien while still allowing you to relate to them. Often you'll forget that someone isn't human until they mention they have gills or something. With the constant shifting of events you tend to get a crosssection, which means you have to pay attention to piece things together as most of the time nobody sticks around to explain recent plot developments. His prose is also surprisingly sharp for a guy with a doctorate in science, although he has been writing for some time now.
The biggest mark against this book is that it's very hard to keep all the races straight without some kind of checklist and there are so many factions and areas on the planet that things can get confusing as to who belongs to what even before the spaceship shows up. This at times can make it difficult to figure out who is fighting over what and what kind of stake anyone has in anything. This can probably be alleviated by not taking two months to read the book like I did (hey, I was busy) and by reading the original series right before it so that things have some more context. Thus, while events are constantly happening and it's really never less than interesting, it's not exactly emotionally compelling at times.
Also, and you probably figured this out but it's the first book of a trilogy, which more specifically means it's the first third of a very long novel. You don't really get a proper ending so much as "Hey, it's over!" and if that kind of thing bothers you, then you may want to reserve time and read them all straight through.
Which is good advice in general, especially when coupled with the first trilogy. Reading all four together is probably an excellent SF reading experience, as Brin's imagination and mastery over the plot is pretty keen. But coming years off the series and taking a while to read this, there were a few "Why do I care about this?" moments. Your mileage will probably vary but full disclosure and all that.
But all around decent, although it would be nice if he finally resolved the Streaker plot. Please?
Brightness Reef
Review by Scott Moulton, 2007-09-11
This is Brin's opening to the second Uplift Trilogy. Like the previos three volumes, this opening is superb. Brin is a fantastic author, who has created a dense, complex futureverse with generally amusing alien races and uplifted Earth races, who amuse even during the most dramatic events. The crux of the story is how does mankind carve out an autonomous existence in the face of alien races with much more advanced technology? Who assists them and what odds do they overcome to succeed? This is a must read for anyone who enjoys sci-fi. This has a touch of hard science to it, but not an overwhelming amount of it. I would love to see Brin do a third tilogy set in this futureverse. His work is fascinating.
