Some of the more aggressive races regard as heresy the humans' claim to have evolved naturally to their current level of intelligence, and therefore wish to exterminate them while many of the others see humans' lack of patrons as an opportunity to bully them mercilessly. As a result several races are eager to force humans to become their clients but galactic law saves humans from this fate because they are patrons themselves, having already made considerable progress in uplifting dolphins and chimpanzees before developing faster-than-light space travel and thus attracting the attention of galactic civilization. In the 'Uplift' novels humans are economically and technologically the weakest spacefaring race, and are an anomaly since they have no ' patron' species responsible for their uplift from animal pre- sapience.

The stories focus almost exclusively on oxygen-breathing species but make it clear that there are other 'orders of life', of which hydrogen-breathers are the most important. This future history depicts a huge galactic civilization responsible for 'uplifting' all forms of life which are potentially capable of building and operating interstellar spaceships for themselves. The Uplift stories Main article: Uplift UniverseĪlthough they make up a minority of David Brin's works, his Uplift stories, set in a common 'universe' or projected future history, have won a large following in the SF community, twice winning the international Science Fiction Achievement Award ( Hugo Award) in the Best Novel category. He currently lives in southern California.īrin's body of science fiction, when taken as a whole, is normally categorized as Hard Science Fiction. He followed this with a Master of Science in applied physics in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy in space science in 1981, both from the University of California, San Diego. In 1973, he graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in astronomy.

Brin was born in Glendale, California in 1950.

The Practice Effect by David Brin