Présentation de l'éditeur
David Brin’s Uplift novels—Sundiver, Hugo award winner The Uplift War, and Hugo and Nebula winner Startide Rising—are among the most thrilling and extraordinary science fiction tales ever written. Now David Brin returns to this future universe for a new Uplift trilogy, packed with adventure, passion and wit.
The planet Jijo is forbidden to settlers, its ecology protected by guardians of the Five Galaxies. But over the centuries it has been resettled, populated by refugees of six intelligent races. Together they have woven a new society in the wilderness, drawn together by their fear of Judgment Day, when the Five Galaxies will discover their illegal colony. Then a strange starship arrives on Jijo. Does it bring the long-dreaded judgment, or worse—a band of criminals willing to destroy the six races of Jijo in order to cover their own crimes?
Extrait
ON THE DAY I GREW UP ENOUGH FOR MY HAIR TO start turning white, my parents summoned all the members of our thronging cluster to the family khuta, for a ceremony giving me my proper name—Hph-wayuo.
I guess it’s all right, for a hoonish tag. It rolls out from my throat sac easy enough, even if I get embarrassed hearing it sometimes. The handle’s supposed to have been in the lineage ever since our sneakship brought the first hoon to Jijo.
The sneakship was utterly gloss! Our ancestors may have been sinners, in coming to breed on this taboo planet, but they flew a mighty star-cruiser, dodging Institute patrols and dangerous Zang and Izmunuti’s carbon storms to get here. Sinners or not, they must have been awfully brave and skilled to do all that.
I’ve read everything I can find about those days, even though it happened hundreds of years before there was paper on Jijo, so all we really have to go on are a few legends about those hoon pioneers, who dropped from the sky to find g’Keks, glavers, and traeki already hiding here on the Slope. Stories that tell how those first hoon sank their sneakship in the deep Midden, so it couldn’t be traced, then settled down to build crude wooden rafts, the first to sail Jijo’s rivers and seas since the Great Buyur went away.
Since it has to do with the sneakship, I guess my given name can’t be too bad.
Still, I really like to be called Alvin.
Our teacher, Mister Heinz, wants us upper graders to start journals, though some parents complain paper costs too much here at the southern end of the Slope. I don’t care. I’m going to write about the adventures me and my friends have, both helping and heckling the good-natured sailors in the harbor, or exploring twisty lava tubes up near Guenn Volcano, or scouting in our little boat all the way to the long, hatchet-shadow of Terminus Rock.
Maybe someday I’ll turn these notes into a book!
And why not? My Anglic is real good. Even grumpy old Heinz says I’m a whiz at languages, memorizing the town copy of Roget’s by the time I was ten. Anyway, now that Joe Dolenz, the printer, has come set up shop in Wuphon, why should we have to count on the traveling librarian’s caravan for new things to read? Maybe Dolenz would even let me set the type myself! That is, if I get around to it before my fingers grow too big to fit around those little backward letters.
Mu-phauwq, my mother, calls it a great idea, though I can tell she’s partly humoring a childish obsession, and I wish she wouldn’t patronize me that way.
My dad, Yowg-wayuo, acts all grumpy, puffing his throat sac and telling me not to be such a humanmimicker. But I’m sure he likes the idea, deep down. Doesn’t he keep taking borrowed books on his long voyages to the Midden, even though you’re not supposed to, because what if the ship sank and maybe the last ancient copy of Moby Dick went down with the crew? Wouldn’t that be a real disaster?
Anyway, didn’t he used to read to me almost from the day I was born? Booming all the great Earthling adventure tales like Treasure Island, Sindbad, and Ultraviolet Mars? So who’s he to call m
