Amazon.com Review
Heaven's Reach is the final volume of the Uplift trilogy, which begins in Streaker, pursued across the galaxy for its precious cargo of ancient artifacts. Just when it looks like things can't get worse for Streaker, the foretold Time of Changes rocks the galaxy. Devastating "space quakes" shake every planet and star, and some of the particularly unscrupulous alien races attempt to use the disaster to further their bizarre goals. There's danger and excitement on almost every page (in contrast to much of the first two books in the series) and Brin finally delivers on many of the mysteries of the Five Galaxies. The Progenitors, the Hydrogen Breathers, Streaker's cargo--these and more are explained at last. Or are they? Each seemingly ultimate truth tends to dissolve a chapter later, revealing a new and more complex truth. New adventures and mysteries await. --Brooks Peck
From Publishers Weekly
The final book in Brin's Uplift Storm Trilogy (Infinity's Shore; Brightness Reef) sets space opera against a canvas that spans the galaxies, colored with interstellar conflict and peopled with smart-mouthed chimpanzees, overwhelmed humans and neo-dolphins who form the stalwart crew of the spaceship Streaker. The narrative, which unfolds at frenzied speed, opens with the Earth under attack by an alliance of evil aliens, the essence of space itself shaking apart and the beleaguered Streaker, captained by Dr. Gillian Baskin, trying to outrun a Jophurian battleship that seeks to destroy it. Rescue comes in the unlikely form of a wormhole that delivers the Streaker to the Old Ones, the godlike beings responsible for nurturing sentient life throughout the Five Galaxies and for inaugurating the UpLift process. While Baskin and her crew fear that the Old Ones are offering them "the embrace of gravitational tides," an interplanetary form of comfortable retirement, they learn that in fact they have been selected for a very special purpose: to journey to remote space, where the missing eight of the original Thirteen Civilized Galaxies wait to be contacted. Tension builds and builds?and then stumbles to a stop. Brin fans will find plenty to gorge themselves on here, including Niss Machines, Galactic Library cubes and Zang ship-entities, and Brin does offer answers to riddles he posed as far back as Startide Rising. But his choice of a conclusion for his massive and immensely popular trilogy proves a letdown, and then some.
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