u/HobbyistC

So I've been interested in FIRE for a few years now, but my personal life has been pretty turbulent in a way that's made long-term planning hard (not physical or mental health related). Things have more or less settled down now and I'm trying to finalise my plan. I don't mind working, but if possible I'd like to start winding down in my early forties and be done with work by 50 or so.

Salary: 34k, hopefully rising to 51k or thereabouts within 5 years, perhaps a tad more, but not many prospects of getting higher than that. Wife does not work but has a family allowance from abroad approx £400. She could get more. Relationship with her is strong.

Pension: DB career average, only 2 years into qualifying service, but some preliminary messing with the calculators suggests the income might be 20k by my mid-forties, nearly 50k by 67. Earliest access for me will be 57.

new home: West Midlands 3-bed, approx 260k including some renovations we're doing, bought outright. I know that might not have been the best decision, but I erred on the side of a low CoL to invest more rather than faffing with mortgages. Also like I said, my life recently has put me off that kind of risk.

Old home: apartment worth 140k, 80k equity. I am desperate to sell this, particularly because there's another 18k tied up in additional stamp duty I want to reclaim.

Investments: 88k SaS ISA + 10k GIA, all in global indexes with a slightly heavier US weighting. Equities about 90%.

Inheritance: I've had the mixed fortune of inheriting everything early -- hence my situation now. Wife stands to inherit up 600k a couple of decades down the line, unsure of the amount.

No car and no plans to get one. No kids for the forseeable, though not against the idea. When the old home is sold I expect bills + groceries to come to about £1,000. My wife and I get feel we have a decent lifestyle right now, and don't expect to spend more unless our circumstances change significantly.

I reckon if I can get all my capital invested into high-equity indexes for 20 years and continue to add a few hundred a month I can conservatively expect 650k before 50, though it'll take a few years to get all of it in ISA wrappers. Contemplated whether it would be more tax efficient to increase pension contributions instead but unsure.

Can then begin reducing hours at work while still accruing some pension, using 2-3% withdrawals. I would prefer not to touch the principal if avoidable, but can live off it for a few years to bridge until early pension. Depending on exactly how greedy I get in my middle age, I could be done before 50.

I am young and foolish though, and trying not to waste a windfall I won't receive again, so open to any advice at all.

I've been sitting on this one for more than a week after finishing it, because I just can't decide if I think it's one of the most original and forwards-thinking speculative novels of the 1980s, or a dull letdown. There are not just conflicting emotions in my head about this book, but two entirely opposed judgements.

Published by Greg Bear in 1985, as an expanded version of a Hugo-winning novelette from 1984 (which is why the first quarter has a noticeably different rhythm and pace from the rest of the story), Blood Music might actually be the first complete "grey goo" horror in modern fiction; it even predated Engines of Creation (non-fiction where the term was coined) by a year. Instead of beserk nanomachines consuming all biomass on the planet, however, it's intelligent, self-aware human cells, released by a rogue scientist in an unfortunate case study of the need for lab safety procedures (and ethics in research).

What follows is, from one perspective, a fairly short apocalyptic thriller, complete with your careless girlfriend, your self-isolating infected researcher, your hilbilly trucker survivors, your teenage girl, and so on. There's mounting panic, confusion, authorities acting to contain things -- but too slowly -- some international politics, and a generous dose of disgusting body horror (truly, some eldritch, depraved body horror).

Unfortunately, at this level, the characters are just not strong enough to carry the story along and it was hard not to feel disconnected from what was unfolding, like the reader was spectating from far away. The pace was so fast, that for all the bizarre imagery and alien landscapes Bear throws across the page (particular credit to the aerial view of the transformed American cities), none of them have time to breathe, so a true horror atmosphere never quite develops.

From earlier reading Forge of God, Bear does struggle at this middle level of storytelling, the part where you have to string a plot together, give it some feeling, and make the people in it sympathetic. He does it with efficiency, but not well enough to do credit to the pioneering ideas and premises he comes up with, or the deeper ideas he uses them to explore.

The idea and the themes are, as always, immaculate. One thing I appreciated in Forge of God that also crops up here is the cosmic helplessness of mankind, almost a science fiction parallel to Lovecraft: the humans in Blood Music are about as competent as you can expect. They realize what is happening and are fully capable of thinking through the implications. Apart from Vergil at the beginning, they do not make classic movie mistakes. Edward's impulsive attack on Vergil at the end of part 1 might have been the most sensible move he possibly could have made -- but it was already too late. Facing a forced evolution we cannot even comprehend, whatever we do or do not do to resist simply is not relevant.

Bear has his finger on the science discourse of the day, as always. Biotechnology was causing a buzz in the early 1980s and he was not alone in questioning its ethics and potential (the reference he makes to cellular memory goes all the way back to Frank Herbert). Like I said, Engines of Creation made waves in an adjacent field the very next year.

But the questions being asked here are penetrating to a rare degree, and Blood Music goes beyond the usual "how will we survive if our flesh turned us into sentient puddles"? From another perspective, this is a very meaningful interrogation of what it means to be conscious, and how much we have to fear from the next stage (if there is one) of our evolution. In some ways, and though ambiguously moral, it is a transhuman text. The sentient cells have no malice in them. Nothing they do to humanity is designed to cause harm, and only some of it is targeted at us at all. To the extent they interact with their hosts, it is first as an object of worship, then a physical space, then information to be encoded, then finally as a lesser to help. Blood Music is merely asking us, head-on, if we really like the look of becoming something new.

Final rating: 3/5

Let's do Ender's Game next, since, I never stop hearing about it and should probably find out what it's about.

I'm back again to round out the original Uplift trilogy with the longest and most ambitious installment yet (although judging by the spine of Infinity's Shore, Brin only kept upping the ante as he went).

My dad didn't tend to leave marginal notes, as several people have wondered, but I do see physical signs of his presence when I go through these, from dog-eared corners to tea and coffee stains, possibly even some wine on occasion. I can also guess how engaged he was from how tattered and frequently read the paperbacks are. For example, I've got Greg Bear's Blood Music in front of me now, which has a few bends in the spine to prove it has been read before, but is otherwise in great condition. Next to it, Startide Rising has one of its leaves hanging by a thread, and The Uplift War is close to totally falling apart. The front cover is also so frayed, I reckon it must have been tossed into a few backpacks or carried along outside a few times. I know he wasn't that careless with his possessions, so I like to think Uplift War was a favorite of his.

Set at the same time as the events of Startide Rising, we are transported to the planet Garth, of which Earthclan purchased the lease at a bargain price on account of an ecological holocaust by its previous owners. There, we gain the perspective of its mostly neo-chimp population, with a few humans and aliens thrown in, as they navigate the hurricane at their doorstep stirred up by Streaker beating its drives on the other side of the galaxy.

And that is about all of the actual plot I should give away, for those who haven't read it. The action kicks off within the first 30 pages once some violently-disposed Gubru show up, and continues with many twists and only short intervals for nearly 600 more.

One thing this book has helped me appreciate about Brin is that he has a very neat sense of unity of action. In their worlds, his books are sprawling, and in the intricacies of their plots they can be labyrinthine, with half a dozen factions scheming against each other at any given time, but in Uplift War we always remain focused squarely on the unfolding Garth crisis. Our characters walk their separate paths around the same obstacles towards goals they always keep in sight. The entire book has two or three short chapters NOT set on Garth or in its orbit, and the wider affairs of Startide Rising and whatever is happening on Earth are very much in the background. As big and ambitious as the Uplift Saga has gotten, it has always been easy to follow for this reason, and it has always kept up a pretty good pace. No 6-book detour around Essos to get stuck in Mereen for David Brin.

And after singing Vernor Vinge's praises to high heaven a few months ago (deservedly), and making excuses for his suspiciously humanlike aliens (perhaps too kindly), I'm very taken with the way Brin is able to characterise non-humans. The chimps are more similar to humans than the dolphins, naturally, as well as further along in uplift, but rather than lean on this excuse to take it easy, as we might say he did in Startide (Charles "A-bomb" Dart's main character trait appears to be autism rather than his chimp nature), it's the smaller differences between our species that Brin has hit on and blown up to see how they might lead to a worldview, or emotional balance, or society.

For example, chimpanzees don't have the sense of shame humans do (not having eaten the fruit and gained knowledge of their nakedness and all), which means their sexual and romantic mores are almost impossible to compare to our own -- group marriages, "sharings", celebrities being rushed on stage by women at the peak of their reproductive cycle (which is much more strongly felt than with humans), and hints to Fiben's college frat parties that raise some definite eyebrows.

Their music is also tightly bound up with the percussive sounds of thunder to which their fallow ancestors danced, so a strong, loud drum rhythm gets them into a near trance.

But what really drives the neo-chimpanzees is their need to prove themselves, even more than the dolphins. Their reproduction is totally controlled using a colored identity card system based on their genes and/or achievement in life, and generation after generation of children are taken from their parents, assessed, and not always sent back. They have university graduates, military officers, even seats at the highest levels of government, but are they truly the equal of their patrons, or is it all an exercise in indulgence, tokenism, or sheer playing pretend?

These ideas were absent from Sundiver, explored in Startide, and now, finally in Uplift War, get the detailed treatment I've been begging for in these reviews. Gailet's realization that the aliens see her university as a kind of pet pen for client species is one of the most heartbreaking passages in the series.

Brin is scathing in his criticism of the reproductive cards, their dehumanisation (irony intended) and -- I was going to say similarity to, but actually it just is -- eugenics, though he stops short of calling the whole thing evil, since uplift is by itself portrayed as a moral good. I'm not sure this is entirely sustainable as a philosophy, but at least it is consistent.

Those who have read it will know that Uplift, its rights and wrongs, is the theme of the entire book, executed via a phenomenal double twist in the story -- but I don't want to take the slightest risk of spoiling that.

Special mention too must go to the aliens in this one. Startide had some very entertaining short chapters describing the battle in space, but in Uplift War, for the first time, we have significant PoV characters as Eatees, including two of our main protagonists, as well as a real window into the Gubru invaders and a little more light shed on the Thennanin. None of these species could ever have evolved on Earth, and their patterns of thought are different to anything intelligent Earth is likely to produce. The Tymbrini are outcasts like humanity, but for different reasons, and they are one of Earth's only allies primarily because of a shared sense of humor, especially intellectual pranks, that the rest of Galactic culture lacks. The Thennanin are rehabilitated from their thuggish appearance in Startide as stubborn, warlike but deeply environmentalist conservatives, with a sincere belief in the importance of the uplift mission.

I especially enjoyed reading about the Gubru and their ridiculous (for humans) political system, a truly alien way of maintaining a civilization that nonetheless appears to work wonders for them (when it works at all).

I've said several times that I like schemes and manipulations, and this entry has the most out of any of them, with the Tymbrini plan in particular spanning the entire length of the novel and keeping me guessing for most of it. Like all dramatically interesting plans, it keeps its credibility by going wrong several times, and eventually coming to fruition in a way that surprises even its creator. Fiben and Gailet's gradual movement from pawns to players on the board mirrors their own species growing in responsibility and strength.

And for the third time running, what I hate most is the mandatory human superman saving the day. This time there is even less excuse than usual: Orley and Demwa at least gave the appearance of working hard to earn their unfair competence, but Robert Oneagle is just a playboy nepo baby who discovers his inner Neolithic man and can suddenly survive in the wilderness, ambush technological armies by himself, and run down game on foot -- which is a real method of hunting, but the "we're humans hell yeah" writing of it might be the single worst thing in this trilogy.

Blood Music next, I think

Overall rating: 4.5/5

In his debut novel, Sundiver, David Brin gave us an imaginative story about first contact, large-scale species engineering, and the ethics of fitting into an imperfect galactic culture, but as I tried to show in my review, I think its reach exceeded its grasp and some of its ideas were distinctly undercooked.

Startide Rising, on the other hand, is a fully mature sequel, taking place over a century after the events of Sundiver and mostly disconnected from them. It was also a roaring success that bagged a Hugo and Nebula in 1984. Its story is self-contained, but the wider conflict and mystery it sets up was the basis for the rest of the books in the Uplift Saga. I don't usually think it's wise to skip entries in a series, even if they are disappointing, but Sundiver is far enough in the background from Startide Rising and enough of the basic ideas are recapitulated that I don't think much would be lost if you just started here.

To restate briefly, civilization across the galaxy (actually now five galaxies) considers it impossible for a species to naturally evolve self-awareness. Instead, intelligent species have a moral duty to "uplift" others in exchange for aeons of legal servitude. As a result, politics has been organised along clan lines with senior "patrons" leading extended families of "client" species. Technology and culture are shared thanks to neutral institutions such as a library, and there is a strict injunction against deliberate ecological damage to planets that might one day be able to host intelligent life.

Humans fit uneasily into this rather unsettling colonial system, with no known patrons, but two clients of their own: genetically modified neo-chimpanzees and, latterly, neo-dolphins. The latter are the first real point of interest in Startide. I said in my Sundiver review that the humans were the most disappointing part of it, and one huge improvement in Startide is that the neo-dolphins are front and center of the story. The majority of characters in this book are non-human, as we follow Streaker, the first dolphin-crewed starship -- designed with minimal help from the galactic library -- as it makes a shocking and catastrophically dangerous discovery in an uncharted nebula to do with the so-called "progenitors", the first intelligent species that started the chain of uplift, now revered with religious, almost eschatological devotion by galactic society. Predictably, the dolphins' discovery throws the Five Galaxies into war and sets several powerful clans in pursuit of the ship's navigational data.

On the surface, then, Startide is a chase and escape story, but what it's really about is the rite of passage of Earthclan's newest intelligent species. The dolphin characters don't feel like reskinned humans. Hearing about their aquatic culture, their legends from pre-sentience, including their own goddess and their respect for singing whales, shared by galactic society, probably engaged my attention more by itself than anything in Sundiver. Their names are Japanese-inspired, which does smack of a kind of bizarre orientalism, but Brin manages to explain this away as an in-universe aesthetic choice by the dolphins themselves, who prefer the sound to Romantic or Germanic languages.

We see how proud the dolphins are of their new-found powers of speech, but also how it, and the whole human-derived mode of thought they have been given by uplift (live in the now, create tools, think logically) clashes with the way of life they and other sea mammals had when they were fallow (remain in movement, sing, think poetically). We get to see the almost religious way dolphins viewed the food chain, and how they forgave most of humanity's ecological crimes on pre-contact Earth because they could understand we were the apex predator -- but some of our behaviour they could never understand at all.

There is a moroseness when they consider what they have lost to make space for rational thought, speech, and technology, but at the same time the neo-dolphins, conscious that they are still a species in progress, have a constant fear of "reversion" under stress, the loss of their self-awareness when they are fighting for their lives or when ancient instincts tell them they have been beached (a similar instinct to humans panicking at the thought of drowning or being waterboarded, but far harder for the dolphins to suppress, since they are only a few dozen generations into self-control).

There is deep respect and idolisation of the few humans on the Streaker by the dolphin majority, but unlike in Sundiver this is presented with some ambiguity: humans may have more experience at the whole rational thought business, and may have begun uplifting dolphins, but that does not make each one a paragon of leadership virtues, nor the system itself free from criticism. In this book we have teenagers who are not ready for the responsibility as well as manipulate men who abuse it. The dolphins frequently feel the burden of their disastrous first mission, and the need to prove the worthiness of their entire race not only to their human patrons, but to the galaxy as well; at the same time, they are suspicious that they are not trusted and may never have been allowed to play freely at all. The fear that the human officers might have "secret orders", that really the dolphins are only being allowed to play pretend at independence, is one of the Uplift Saga's more mature ideas that is taken further in The Uplift War. Uplift is a fundamentally controlling system, even when carried out with the best of intentions to bring a new species to intelligence, that requires playing God with a species that may increasingly come to resent interference. Even at the early stage the dolphins are at, they resent the control of their genes and reproduction.

This is the more grown-up and complex approach to the colonial ideas of uplift that I wished we had gotten in Sundiver. As Brin writes in the epilogue, it is a fundamental good to allow all living creatures to reach their full potential: in this, the Galactics have hit on an idea humans can symphatise with. But by its very nature, embarking on a programme of uplift is an ethical minefield open to abuse both systemically and systematically.

Brin's confidence writing aliens has also increased, and we get much more detailed information on the various species that come after the Streaker. I don't want to say too much about the various alien clans, but each is fleshed out much more (though less than they would be in The Uplift War). The contrast to the Earthclan species is another topic of interest in the novel.

However, one persistent problem is preventing me from giving this book 5 stars. Once again, Brin is corroding his own messages by making his human heroes, some of them, just that good and that virtuous that one wonders we don't deserve to take over the entire galaxy ourselves. The dolphins look to Tom Orley to save the day, and save the day he does. He isn't quite the ridiculous superhuman that Demwa was in Sundiver, but all three books in the first trilogy have been brought down by this strange fixation on having a secondary plot about hypercompetent men feeling their own empowerment and taking mastery of a situation where they should really be dead in seconds. As amusing as it was to see Tom killing a laser-armed alien soldier by karate kicking it in the throat, after flying across a planet in a rickety propellor plane and being hunted through a wasteland for days, it does not fit in well with the kind of adventure the rest of Startide is trying to be.

The only possible explanation for this to fit in that I can think of is that Brin wants to show humans at their own full potential, but since he simply does this by comparing exceptional individuals to probationers, villians, dolphins, chimpanzees and aliens, it comes across as insensitive hero-worship at best, and full on ubermensch philosophising at worst, especially with the focus all of these books have on heritable characteristics and genetic engineering.

Overall rating: 4/5

I started Sundiver and immediately realised I was going to have to keep reading for a while before I could start to review Brin's Uplift Saga. I've now read up to the end of Uplift War. I'll post about the first three books in turn over the next few days, with some overall thoughts at the end.

Sundiver was David Brin's first novel, and he decided against playing it safe. Unfortunately a lot of the exceptional ideas he comes up with are not executed in this book as well as they would be in his later ones. This is one of the reasons I didn't want to judge it in isolation.

The fundamental premise is clear in the first few dozen pages: humanity has just cast off a totalitarian world government, and is now an enlightened bureaucracy passing its time psychologically profiling citizens based on their violent tendencies, stripping various civil rights if they fail. If this seems morally ambiguous to you, you'll be even more interested to learn that we have also recently succeeded in engineering or "uplifting" chimpanzees and dolphins to self-awareness, through successive generations of genetic modification, socialization, and education, giving Earth the beginnings of its next two intelligent species.

When first contact is made with galactic alien civilisation, the "Eatees" are pleased with this, since for several billion years the main goal of sapient species has been to uplift others, with complex rules and conventions governing interactions between "patrons" and "clients", clan politics across the galaxy (later retconned to five galaxies), and a loose network of institutions that provide library and ecological services for the good of all.

For the Eatees, uplift into an established galactic system with shared technology and culture, into an existing clan through which you can rise to senior status over millions of years, is the default life cycle of a species, and though evolution is acknowledged, the idea of a species evolving intelligent thought all on its own is considered utterly ludicrous and unprecedented. This makes them particularly interested in "wolfling" humanity and its two new clients of its own.

Mysteries ensue and many of these ideas are then tested in a pressure-cooker journey, literally, to the surface of Sol itself. But the literary star of the show is the worldbuilding and, I would argue, the drama.

Sundiver does a fantastic job introducing a truly novel galaxy, with a commentary on colonialism, particularly as it affected Native Americans, that early 1980s America absolutely needed to be beaten over the head with (although if you view it more widely, there are some serious issues with how Brin seems to think about progress, necessity and race relations in the Uplift Saga -- more on that at the end).

I'm also a sucker for schemes and plots, and Baron Harkonnen would have been thrilled with the dense galactic politics and the layered conspiracies unpicked in Sundiver. Especially for a first attempt at a novel, the plans of the various characters are intelligent without coming across as too convoluted to suspend disbelief, and there are enough mistakes, improvisations and last-second deductions to give the cat and mouse game in the second half credibility. Several of the alien factions are not happy with the status humanity has gotten so soon after its discovery, and several humans are suspect for their own reasons.

Ironically, the problems begin with the humans. This book introduces a debate between "shirts" and "skins", human factions who believe that they were secretly uplifted in the past versus those who think "we did it ourselves", and it begins to explore how each views the aliens, the Institutes like the Library, and the etiquette conventions by which the aliens set so much store in their vast culture. In capable hands, it could make for a fine study of human pride, quality, and arrogance altogether. But Brin, despite how the novel presents itself, is clearly coming down on the side of the skins. Our hero is literally a self-described ubermensch who's biggest problem in life is that he gave himself schizophrenia because otherwise he would be too awesome. He outguesses and outplays the stuck-up aliens at every turn, completely contrary to his own monologue about not following the American Indian example and assuming exceptionalism. He even dodges lasers.

In general, the nascent earth government wheels and deals to get the best of billion-year-old galactic institutes and come out on top. Its handling of the uplift programme for chimpanzees and dolphins is an irreproachable masterpiece (of course), and by Eatee standards the terms of patronhood and liberty for the client race are so very generous (more on that in a moment).

Women, of course, throw themselves at our hero, in very demeaning and immature ways that I think we could call sexist even by 1980s writing standards. There is a convention where "man" and "woman" have been replaced in the world by the terms "mel" and "fem", as a nod to equality and progress, but I have no idea how this change is progressive. The stereotypes for men and women are totally unchanged, so swapping out the vocabulary for the sake of adding more jargon words seems a little forced.

This is what grinds my gears the most about Sundiver: it comes across as radically new, forwards-thinking and rational, with a human species that has abandoned its old ideas and tendencies -- and then under the surface it just... isn't. I actually found the discourse around probationers and citizens to be rather disturbing. Giving people a retinal test to see what holds their attention in a series of images, and then profiling the violence inherent in their personality, is a downright dystopian approach to the law. It is based on discourse that was current in the 1980s and 1990s, but it's an example of the kind of false progressivism you sometimes see in that era that today we like to forget we ever dallied with, rather like eugenics in the early 1900s I recognize that Brin was intending to present it critically, that it's controversial in universe, and that the new Earth government is by no means perfect, but nowhere in Sundiver or its sequels can I find any definitive statement -- or even an implication -- that the system is judged immoral and must go. The closest we get is a minor subplot in The Uplift War about the treatment of probationers doing more harm than good and some vague reforms.

Speaking of eugenics and colonialism, the message of Sundiver is absolutely that the way galactic society treats client races is wrong, and paralleled to some of the worst episodes in earth history -- yet at the same the message is sorely weakened by the implication that actually, humans are doing it pretty well and fairly. Granted, this problem is mostly limited to the first book, with the sequels showing the ugly side of Uplift, but even there I can't quite sympathise with the way everything is tied into a neat bow at the end.

Overall rating: 2.5/5