Heaven's Reach

Afterword

I feel it’s a bad practice for a writer to get stuck in a particular “universe,” writing about the same characters or situations over and over again. To keep from getting stale, I try never to write two “universe” books in a row. But clearly, the Uplift Storm Trilogy (Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, and Heaven’s Reach) is an exception. I never deliberately set out to “go the trilogy route,” but this work took off, gaining complexity and texture as I went. Life can be that way. If you drop one stone into a pond, the pattern of ripples may seem clear. But start tossing in more than a few at a time, and the patterns take off in ways you never imagined. A realistic story is much the same. Implications and ramifications spread in all directions.

Many people have asked questions about my Uplift series. This is certainly not the first time an author speculated about the possibility of genetically altering non-sapient animals. Examples include The Island of Dr. Moreau, Planet of the Apes, and the Instrumentality series of Cordwainer Smith. I grew up admiring these works, and many spin-offs. But I also noticed that nearly all these tales assume that human “masters” will always do the maximally stupid/evil thing. In other words, if we meddle with animals to raise their intelligence, it will be in order to enslave and abuse them.

Don’t get me wrong! Those morality tales helped tweak our collective conscience toward empathy and tolerance. Yet, ironically, I feel it is now unlikely our civilization would behave in a deliberately vile way toward newly sapient creatures, because the morality tales did their job!

The Uplift series tries to take things to the next level. Suppose we genetically enhance chimps, dolphins, and others, with the best of motives, offering them voices and citizenship in our diverse culture. Won’t there still be problems? Interesting ones worth a story or two? In fact, I expect we’ll travel that road someday. Loneliness ensures that someone will attempt Uplift, sooner or later. And once an ape talks, who will dare say “put him back the way he was”?

It’s about time to start thinking about the dilemmas we’ll face, even if we’re wise.

As Glory Season let me explore a range of relationships that might emerge from self-cloning, the Uplift Universe gives me a chance to experiment with all sorts of notions about starfaring civilization. And since it is unapologetic space opera, those notions can be stacked together and piled high! For instance, since we’re positing Faster Than Light Travel (FTLT) I went ahead and threw in dozens of ways to cheat Einstein. The more the merrier!

One problem in many science fictional universes is the assumption that things just happen to be ripe for adventure when we hit the space lanes. (For instance, the villains, while dangerous, are always just barely beatable, with some help from the plucky hero.) In fact, the normal state of any part of the universe, at any given moment, is equilibrium. Things are as they have been for a very long time. An equilibrium of law perhaps, or one of death. We may be the First Race, as I discuss in my story “Crystal Spheres.” Or we could be very late arrivals, as depicted in the Uplift books. But we’re very unlikely to meet aliens as equals.

Another theme of this series is environmentalism. What we’re doing to Earth makes me worry there may have already been “brushfire” ecological holocausts across the galaxy, set off by previous starfaring races who heedlessly used up life-bearing planets as their “Galactic Empire” burned out during its brief reign of a few ten thousand years. (Note how often science fiction tales ring with the shout, “Let’s go fill the galaxy!” If this already happened a few times, it might help explain the apparent emptiness out there, for the galaxy seems, at this moment, to have few, if any, other voices.)

A galaxy might “burn out” all too easily, unless something regulates how colonists treat their planets, forcing them to think about the long run, beyond short-term self-interest. The Uplift Universe shows one way this might occur. For all the nasty traits displayed by some of my Galactics — their past-fixation and prim fanaticism, for instance — they do give high priority to preserving planets, habitats, and potential sapient life. The result is a noisy, vibrant, bickering universe. One filled with more life than there might have been otherwise.

For the record, I don’t think we live in a place like the wild, extravagant Uplift Universe. But it’s a fun realm to play in, between more serious stuff.

Pile on those marvels!

Hang on. There’s more to come.