In science fiction, uplift is the intervention in the evolution of species of low-intelligence or even nonsapient species in order to increase their intelligence. This is usually accomplished by cultural, technological, or evolutionary interventions such as genetic engineering. The earliest appearance of the concept is in H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau. The term was popularized by David Brin in his Uplift series in the 1980s.
History
The concept of uplift can be traced to H. G. Wells's 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the titular scientist transforms animals into horrifying parodies of humans through surgery and psychological torment. The resulting animal-people obsessively recite the Law, a series of prohibitions against a reversion to animal behaviors, with the haunting refrain of "Are we not men?". Wells's novel reflects Victorian concerns about vivisection and the power of unrestrained scientific experimentation to do terrible harm.
Other early literary examples can be found in the following works:
- Franz Kafka's A Report to an Academy (1917) is a short story in which Red Peter, an ape, describes his capture by humans, adaptation and mimicry of their behavior, habits and speech (originally in order to escape), and subsequent integration into human society.
- L. Sprague de Camp's "Johnny Black" stories (beginning with "The Command") about a black bear raised to human-level intelligence, published in Astounding Science-Fiction from 1938–1940. As a result, a significant part of the conflict in the series revolves around the differing policies of Galactics and humans toward their client races. Galactic races traditionally hold their uplifted "clients" in a hundred-millennium-long indenture, during which the "patrons" have extensive rights and claims over clients' lives and labor power. In contrast, humans have given their uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees near-equal civil rights, with a few legal and economic disabilities related to their unfinished state. A key scene in Startide Rising is a discussion between a self-aware computer (the Niss) and a leading human (Gillian) about how the events during their venture (and hence the novel's plot) relate to the morality of the Galactics' system of uplift.
More recent examples include the board game Race for the Galaxy, which features uplift genetics mechanics, and Adrian Tchaikovsky's 2015 novel Children of Time, which depicts the accidental uplift of spiders by a nano-virus originally intended for monkeys.
Analysis
Some commentators, such as , have argued that some pieces of literature have used uplift as an allegory for the white man's burden and colonialism. Booker singles out Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth as a novel that mirrors Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in a science-fiction setting. Other authors, by contrast, have used uplift as a narrative foil to colonialism, presenting uplift not only as benevolent but as a virtuous reversal of colonial attitudes.
Selected works
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Year
! Series
! Creator
! Media type
! Notes
|-
| 1896
| The Island of Doctor Moreau
| H. G. Wells
| Novel
| Considered the earliest appearance of the concept; depicts the surgical transformation of animals into human-like beings. The series also explores the opposite of uplift, the reduction of the human species to a regressed, atavistic, savage-like animal state.
|-
|2007–2017
|Mass Effect
|BioWare
|Video game series
|Before the events of the first game, the Salarians, a hyper-intelligent but physically weak alien race, uplifted the Krogan, a combative and rapidly-reproducing race, in order to defeat the Rachni, a hive-minded species, in an interstellar conflict. When the Rachni were defeated, the Krogan experienced a massive population boom and found themselves in conflict with other species in the galaxy. In response, the Salarians launched a biological weapon called the Genophage against them which only made 1 in 1,000 pregnancies viable, with the rest being stillbirths. The ethical ramifications of the uplift and bioweapon are used as plotlines throughout the series.
|-
|2015–2022
|Children of Time
|Adrian Tchaikovsky
|Series of novels
|Three novels (also including Children of Ruin and Children of Memory) explore how various earth animal species evolve and develop civilizations on terraformed exoplanets when uplifted by a human-developed nanovirus originally intended for monkeys.