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 of 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.
In Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series "underpeople" are created from animals through unexplained technological means explicitly to be servants of humanity, and were often treated as less than slaves by the society that used them, until the laws were reformed in the story "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" (1962). Smith's characterizations of underpeople are frequently quite sympathetic, and one of his most memorable characters is C'Mell, the cat-woman who appears in "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" and in Norstrilia (1975).
David Brin has stated that his Uplift Universe was written at least in part in response to the common assumption in earlier science fiction such as Smith's work and Planet of the Apes that uplifted animals would, or even should, be treated as possessions rather than people.[4] 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.
The 1963 science fiction novel by French author Pierre Boulle was adapted into the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, launching the Planet of the Apes media franchise.[6] The series also explores the opposite of uplift, the reduction of the human species to a regressed, atavistic, savage-like animal state.
Starting with Sundiver in 1980, Brin's six novels (and several short stories) making up the Uplift War and Uplift Storm pair of trilogies describe a universe dominated by a society built around a process of uplift, where full sentience is deemed virtually impossible without the intervention of another species through uplift.
Uplift is a major theme. Some cards have "UPLIFT" highlighted in the title and can help score points and achieve goals. Designer Tom Lehmann attributes the inspiration for uplift to David Brin's Uplift series.[7]
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.[8] When the Rachni were defeated, the Krogan experienced a massive population boom 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.[9]
Pilkington, Ace G. (2017). "Uplift". Science Fiction and Futurism: Their Terms and Ideas. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Vol. 58. McFarland. pp. 145–149. ISBN978-0-7864-9856-7.
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