Jophur
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The Jophur are a fictional extraterrestrial race from David Brin's Uplift Universe.
Physically, they are comprised of a stack of waxy, living rings. Each ring serves a different purpose, and they connect to each other to form a single being by chemical means via an electrically conductive, sap-like substance that flows down the center to bind the stack together. A Master ring provides a strong sense of individuality to each stack and enforces this with corrective electrical shocks to non-compliant rings.
[edit] History and origins
Originally engineered as the traeki, an intelligent but scatter-minded race, their patrons (the Poa) asked another race (the Oallie) to engineer them further to increase their utility. The Oailie created 'master rings', shiny black (often described as 'silvery') rings that created a strong sense of self identity. The newly reinvigorated Jophur, as the traeki with the new master rings were called, quickly became a strong, vigorous force in the Five Galaxies.
According to various books in the series, most prominently the trilogy that followed the characters of Startide Rising, the Jophur quickly began a genocide and eradicated all but a small group of the original traeki, with the exception of a small Sooner (a word used to describe groups that illegally settle worlds that had been deemed fallow) group that settled on the planet Jijo in the fourth galaxy.
[edit] See also
| The Uplift series |
| Sundiver (1980) | Startide Rising (1983) | The Uplift War (1987) |
| Uplift Storm trilogy |
| Brightness Reef (1995) | Infinity's Shore (1996) | Heaven's Reach (1998) |
