I first read Startide Rising when I was a teen and thought it was one of the best SF novels I had read. It had talking dolphins! And weird aliens! And bizarre technology! What more could I have asked for? I reread it recently to see if it still held up after all these years, now that I'm older and (possibly) wiser and more jaded.
It was just as great as I remembered it being.
David Brin's novel, the second in his first Uplift trilogy, starts with a Star Wars-esque in medias res bang, as the Earth starship Streaker, having escaped a major space battle, limps into a planetary system and lands on the mostly-water planet Kithrup to make repairs and hide from the various ships looking for it. The Streaker stumbled upon a derelict fleet of ships in space and discovered among the wreckage some evidence of the mysterious Progenitors, the race that started the millennia-old galactic society of advanced races "uplifting" primitive races into starfaring beings. Because humans uplifted themselves, with no direct help from a patron race, they're viewed as barbaric upstarts, and most of the other powerful races despise them. The idea that humans could hold the key to Progenitor mysteries is abhorrent and blasphemous to many of the other races, so a host of powerful aliens attack the Streaker and follow it to Kithrup. While the Streaker crew struggles to get their ship operational, while dealing with intense political and racial conflict among the crew, different alien groups engage in a vicious battle above the planet, fighting over who gets to take Streaker and its "wolfling" crew.
Brin has created a massive, high-level imagination tapestry of a setting, with an epic history, reality-warping technology, truly alien cultures--all grounded by engaging characters and a thrill-a-minute plot. The novel switches perspective throughout, giving us the point of view of humans, genetically-augmented dolphins, and various aliens who are vastly different from us, but still completely believable and interesting. Startide Rising is intelligent, thought-provoking SF while also being exciting, wide-eyed space opera. This is far-future SF at its best.