I have no idea if this is the right thread for it, but I was thinking about the scifi trope of uplifting animals to make new species of people and I realized that it's almost always the same few species-dolphins, chimps, dogs. The one time I saw something that had more than those three and didn't involve hive-minded ants, it had owls. Owls would be terrible uplift candidates! Their eyes are so big that they have to have tiny brains! Anyway. I've only seen the following species uplifted in fiction: cetaceans, a lot. Dogs, a lot. Chimps, a lot. Ants, with each colony being one individual, once. Ravens, once. Cockatoos, once. Lions, once. Squid, once. Owls, once. Elephants, once. Everything after 'ants' was in the same work-the only work I've seen to consider the idea that something other than mammals and magically hiveminded insect colonies could be uplifted. What species have you seen uplifted in fiction? Which species would you think would be interesting to see uplifted? What changes would you make, apart from making them able to think?
Mole people! :D Mole people is currently funny to me, because on a poncho human!Frisk blog I check a lot, a weird anon sent in a hilariously absurd ask about mole people. Personally, I think that pigeons would be interesting to uplift-they're already surprisingly smart, scientists have taught 18 pigeons to sort-of read around 58 words! EDIT: I've never even thought of the idea of uplifted thylacanes!
he wasn't a mole, he was a pig-mole. D< And technically all of TTGL's "beastmen" are animal hybrids, so. #sorry I'm pedantic and also just rewatch the last six or so episodes over the last two days #I love ttgl #my drill will pierce something or other
Eagles, dogs, bulls and cats (and probably many more species, I don't have the book to hand) are known as the Underpeople in Cordwainer Smith's stories - as a sort of slave class fighting for their rights. All written before 1966, so kind of old, but the writing is spot on and a lot of it is influenced by Chinese narrative styles.
Meow the catbird from this exists in a world where all the birds suddenly gained human-level intelligence, if that counts?
Schlock Mercenary also has uplifted elephants. ETA: And a bear. That whole concept fits with a thing I'd like to explore, which would be humanity's Sci-Fi Thing(tm) being biological engineering, and I think I kinda want to have humans uplift corvids in a thing I could write.
I'm not sure how much Rifts counts because I think technically most of the 'uplifted' are actually hybrids. The main ones are standard dogs (because dogs have a long & storied history of human companionship and servitude to humanity) but the Lone Star and one of the South America books have cats (more big cats than housecats) and Lone Star has stats for bats, rats, monkeys (too close to chimps?) and bears.
Humanity's sci-fi thing being biological engineering is interesting, and I actually read a short story with a little bit of that? There were these aliens that were, culturally, terrified of plants, so they somehow got every plant on their home planet into greenhouses and considered humans primitive and barely worth trying to negotiate with because we 'let' plants grow in cities and they thought we were too stupid to throughly cook any plant matter we ate. One time both the human ambassador and the alien ambassador took their small kids to a meeting thingy and the kids talked, resulting in the aliens discovering that we considered their fear of plants absolutely idiotic and also to learn some things about apple cultivation because the human kid decided to explain it to the alien kid who made disparaging comments about the human kid's apple. Anyway! While I haven't read anything with uplifted bears (I read something with naturally evolved bear people once), Freefall has a bit where it's revealed that the uplifted wolf protag has some bear DNA, because copying human DNA was illegal or something and she needed wrists, which bears have but wolves don't really. She also had reduced bone loss in microgravity, flipped retinas, an added fovea, and less colour vision than an actual wolf, a mane, and due to legal requirements she had an order system and safeguards, as well as 'settings' which were changeable with specialized equipment that fitted over her wrist. Spoiler: Spoilers Her designer was very upset to learn that the remote which knocks her out had been used for non-emergency situations. He was also upset about her order system being used and changed her settings to make only one person have order authority, as well as making it so that it took specialist, uplifted-wolf-only remotes to knock her out. ETA: Bat people? Bat people!
With like...flipper-hands? Or telekinetic penguins? Cyborg penguins with either mechanical arms or swarms of helperbots?
Telekinetic werepenguins that are penguins first. Men second. They have an advanced geology tradition.
I am reminded of that one PPC agent who ended up as a were-penguin Borg Time Lord. (Friendly reminder that the PPC is supposed to kill Mary Sues.)
