I saw it as a really fantastic riff on David Brin’s “uplift” series. In fact, Tchaikovsky calls this out explicitly in naming one of the (IIRC) habitat orbiters

I saw it as a really fantastic riff on David Brin’s “uplift” series. In fact, Tchaikovsky calls this out explicitly in naming one of the (IIRC) habitat orbiters Brin.