I'm currently reading the Uplift War, the third of David Brin's initial trilogy of Uplift books, in which the galaxy's sentient races are all "uplifted" by older and more technologically advanced races. All except humanity! Which is the main narrative engine of the books so far (he wrote a further trilogy in this setting, which I haven't yet gotten to).
The books are decent. I went through something of a David Brin phase in high school, around the time the film adaptation of his book the Postman came out. I knew about the Uplift books at the time, but didn't pick up the first of the series (Sundiver) until 2004 or so, and the second, Started Rising, a couple of years later.
I mention that to emphasize that because it's been so long since I read them, I don't actually remember much about the plots. So my thoughts are limited to what I'm currently reading in the Uplift War.
As I said, the main thrust of the story is that humans are the only known race (called wolflings) to have uplifted themselves, and to have uplifted pre-sentient races on Earth, in this case chimpanzees and dolphins. It's a neat idea, especially when the narrative examines the ethics of uplifting a race to sentience, asking whether any race even has the right to do that. Uplift tends to be portrayed as a form of indenture (or even slavery), an idea that drives the antagonists and the protagonists who want to avoid this fate.
What I find a little frustrating about all this is that every alien POV character, in each of their chapters, reflects on how freewheeling and clever and exceptional the humans are. They uplifted themselves, after all, before Galactic Civilization made contact with them. They allow their client races, the chimpanzees and dolphins, more leeway to question them than "older races" do. And they just don't abide by the stodgy old norms of Galactic Society, provoking annoyance in the more rigid races and admiration in others.
Leaving aside that this is kind of a "Where's Poochie?" dynamic, it's also hard not to see American exceptionalism in this. I'm aware that SF has a long history of equating humanity with American culture - it's sort of the whole guiding metaphor of Star Trek, for instance, though it goes back further than that. But it's a side of SF that's always sort of bothered me, and I think it's somehow more glaring here than in other SF novels I've read.
To be clear, I'm not surprised or annoyed that American SF does that, because British SF has its own weird tropes and I'm sure SF written in other languages does too. But because the majority of classic SF takes on this trope, it's fairly baked into the genre, and it can get excessive, as here.
It may also be a function of when Brin wrote the stories, of course. The Uplift War came out in 1987, when the US was winning the Cold War and its ideals were on the ascendant, as they haven't really been since 2001 or so. When he was writing, China was still in the first stages of opening up in the wake of Mao's worst excesses, while India was still the "Third World" and not on the radar of most Americans. The one real challenger to American power at the time would likely have been Japan.
So the dominant culture would naturally be the US, which I can understand, for that time. More recent works, like Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice trilogy, certainly take more of their window dressing from what the West knows of Asian culture (like tea-drinking and despotism). But I find the idea that Earth/America is this vital, young society that will form an example for the stodgy, decadent, older races to be a little uncomfortable.
That is, after all, the reasoning behind the colonization and carving up of Asia in particular by Europe and the US (as opposed to the regions that were considered primitive). In the books, certain cultures get "tired" and get supplanted by more energetic ones - indeed, one extremely old race in the Uplift War is described as exclusively interested in ever-more esoteric forms of meditation, and expected to die out soon.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that David Brin's a giant racist, because politically he's aggressively centrist (yes, I know), and generally quite sensible. But even those who don't actively believe racist ideology can come out with inappropriate things from time to time, and I suspect that's the case here.
The other thing about it is that I wish the damn aliens would just shut up about how great the damn humans are. It's fair for older cultures to see something refreshing about newer cultures that do things a little better, but Brin's humans seem to be just about the best thing that's happened to the galaxy, which feels a little rich given how shittily we're comporting ourselves at the moment. The closest analogue for me is the Elves in Tolkien's world, a group that is described as so wonderful that after a few hundred pages of reading about how great all their stuff is I just wish he'd get back to talking about the hobbits or dwarves or someone more interesting.
I'm surely not the only one who gets a little tired of the author slobbering over one particular group in their books, where even their negative points are actually positives. And as I said, given where America is right now, and the fact that literally no one else in the world wants to follow our example, it just reads as limited. A much better contrast, from around the same time period, is the Keith Giffen and Tom & Mary Bierbaum "Five Years Later" Legion of Superheroes run. That series builds on the old idea that Earth is basically the US, but has been taken over by despotic aliens with the connivance of corrupt humans, and feels a lot more realistic. Not because I believe that's happening now, but simply because it can happen anywhere, and thus can happen here.
And therein lies my discomfort with American exceptionalism. For as much as I buy into the ideals of the US (too often unattained, alas), I also remain aware that the US is a country like many others, populated by people just like any other, and so susceptible to humanity's worst excesses. And that's something we really are seeing right now.
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