Sundiver – David Brin (1980)

David Brin’s first novel and the first novel in his Uplift Saga books. I think there are six of them in total. Like first novels, there’s a lot thrown at the wall here. Brin was about 30 when he wrote this book, but he was also working on his PhD in Astronomy at the same time. The book itself feels somewhere in between a more hard sci-fi Neal Stephenson or a Kim Stanley Robinson book with a sense of humor. Spitting the difference.

As hard sci-fi, there’s a fair bit of almost fantasy involved with the inclusion of many different alien species as well. The story begins with our protagonist, Jacob Demwa, working via a space elevator to send materials into orbit. The project he’s working on has an accident and in the fallout he’s recruited to work on the “Sundiver” project, which involves tunneling into the plasma of the sun for research purposes. He’s hesitant, but agrees. There he finds a whole host of different characters from a much older human woman space traveler who is in relative time close to his age, but in travel time much older. Several alien species, intelligent dolphins, whales, and chimps, and most importantly, a mystery!

The book is mostly an investigation into acts of sabotage on the project, while also working through the mysteries of the research itself, which involves the origins of human evolution (natural or alien-enhanced?). The book is a little cluttered and convoluted, but it’s also fun and weird and interesting all at the same time.