#vondaniken — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

I’m reading David Brin’s *Sundiver*, the first book in his Uplift series, for the first time in I don't know how long. I vaguely remembered that part of the whole “uplift” concept was that we were genetically altering dolphins and chimps to be able to communicate with them.

What I didn’t remember was that there is a larger conceit that every intelligent, spacefaring race in the galaxy has been similarly “uplifted” by a patron race, and (at the time of this book) only humanity does not have a known patron — and this has led to a cultural split on Earth between two camps: those who believe that humanity evolved our intelligence naturally (as was widely believed before first contact with alien races), and those who believe that we had patrons who for some reason abandoned us and whose memory has been almost entirely lost to the mists of time. One of the foremost revered historical figures for this second group is noted 20th century historian…Erich von Däniken.

It’s suddenly a lot harder for me to take this novel terribly seriously when the basic premise is apparently, “what if von Däniken was right?” I’ll keep reading, as the next two books in the series were Hugo winners, so they’re part of my “read all the Hugo Best Novels” project.

But…really? This one was first published in 1980, and there had already been several debunkings of von Däniken’s work by that time. Hopefully Brin was just having a bit of fun with the idea as a good jumping off point for a book.

(If you’re not familiar with the name, von Däniken is one of the main proponents of the oft-debunked, ridiculed, and frankly racist “ancient astronauts” theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_von_D%C3%A4niken)

#DavidBrin #uplift #AncientAstronauts #vonDäniken #ScienceFiction