Continuing my reread of the Uplift series.

The Uplift War is not a sequel to Startide Rising, it's more of a parallel story. While the Streaker is on the run, along with the secret of what they'd found, some of the Galactic races decided that instead of chasing the dolphin ship, they would attack Earth and it's colonies to force the humans to hand over the information that they don't actually have about the find.

On Garth, a planet that Earth got as a colony because the previous tenants had been removed after causing ecological disaster so it isn't a desireable world, we follow Robert Oneagle and the the daughter of the Tymbrini ambassador who are sent into the hills as a precaution as the Gubru invasion fleet arrives. The seas aren't good for dolphins, so instead we get lots of uplifted chimpanzees in this book.

While there are fights, this is not an action book. Much more time is spent on politics, plotting, and the mysterious 'Garthlings' in the hills.

But since this is the sort of story *I* like, this is a good thing. In fact, my only real complaint is that the author seemed to have swallowed a thesaurus and a dictionary about the time he was writing it. Every so often, I had to google a word that was dropped in and couldn't even quite be worked out based on the context.

Of the initial three books of the series, Startide Rising is probably the most critically acclaimed, Uplift War was the longest, and Sundiver is still my favorite.