Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
as prodigy.net> declared:

Let me pour some gasoline on one particular smouldering
cigarette?

In 1985/6 STARTIDE RISING won the Hugo and Nebula for best
novel, beating out BLOOD MUSIC (in both awards).

To be fair, the novelette of BLOOD MUSIC had scooped the
awards in 1983/84 ... but I maintain that, with 20+ years of
hindsight, BLOOD MUSIC was a far more significant novel than
STARTIDE RISING. SR was fun, I will concede, but while it's
a fast, plot and character driven space opera that did much
to cement David Brin's reputation, it wasn't shatteringly
brilliant. In contrast, BM is arguably the best genre
biohorror novel of the 20th century (I think it beats out
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN handily in this department), and
introduced a bunch of radical concepts new to SF --
computational metaphors in genetics, the singularity,
nanotechnology, and a stab at defining a plausible
mind-uploading scenario.

I'm not knocking on STARTIDE RISING as being a *bad* book