Sundiver (The Uplift Saga #1), by David Brin

  David Brin was 30 when he published Sundiver in 1980, but the book, his first, feels much older, almost van Vogtian. The writing style and subject matter further strengthen the feeling. Imagine a bunch of humans and aliens in the future, diving into the Sun to communicate with a newly discovered race of intelligent beings there. A tree alien, an uplifted chimp and others are part of the expedition.

  All the tropes of sci-fi pulp are there: a youngish protagonist of the same age as the author, romance, mystery and its deductive solving as well as its revealing in elaborate group discussions, the belief in the power of meditation and trance to improve the mind, people having Erich von Däniken as the prophet of the origin of the human race, lasers, fist fights, hints of colonialism, and so on and so on. The book is very entertaining, but it's spectacularly outdated. I guess the lasers and the Däniken references place it after 1960, but ignoring that, one could believe it was written in the '40s.

  There are some ingenious ideas in the book, though. In this universe, intelligence is believed to never have been evolved by itself, instead "patron races" uplift existing native animals to intelligence, generating a complex web of patrons and clients. Not humans, though. They have been partially uplifted then left to their own devices, thus placing them in a dubious middle of the hierarchy, while kept away from the somewhat monolithic culture of the galaxy. Humans are both exotic and quaint, ignorant and arrogant, daring to know things they figured out for themselves rather than spoon fed by "the Library".

   I don't think I will read more of this series, but I might read more from Brin, whenever I feel the need to go classical without diving into a time compression bubble.