Existence
2012 • 560 pages
Ratings16
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings16
Average rating3.8
Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence.
Gerald Livingstone is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”
Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.
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One I will have to re-read and assess after sometime has passed. Brin never fails to engage the mind.Ideas flow thick and fast.Characters playing out their lives in plausible future environments and events. However perhaps too many,too quick. For some reason I keep thinking of an interactive video game rather than a novel. This may be unfair because I cant articulate why. I didnt make much of an emotional connection with any of the characters.As I reached the end I didnt care about what happened to anybody although I did about what would happen to our species. Brin made me care about chatterbox individual dolphins in the past [so much so i wish he'd get back to them] so probably my expectations arent that high. He's clearly doing a “Brunner” and I applaud him for that as its a style worth keeping alive. Earth was a book of ideas and the characters plus the ideas and events drove the plot.
But I need to re read maybe the ideas just overpowered the story and second time around I'll find it a more enjoying read.
A fun read. Brin never fails me. A little frantic for some I expect, but I like the feel and breadth of the story. My only complaint is the dolphins seem to get left hanging.
David Brin's Existence is both very interesting and somewhat irritating. The book has eight parts. The first six parts tell an engaging and interesting story which follows the adventures of several protagonists during a time of first contact. At that point I surmise that Brin decided that he just wouldn't be able to finish the book if he continued that way (at least not in a single volume). Anyway, he radically changed the style in parts seven and eight. In those two sections we no longer see the protagonists meeting challenges as events unfold. Instead, the story takes great leaps forward in time, pushing to story forward. Some foreshadowed adventures and events that I was anticipating were told only in hindsight. This let Brin finish the story in one (big) book, but at some cost to the storytelling.
Existence is chock full of interesting and provocative ideas about what the future may bring. Whether it is technical, scientific, social, economic, or you name it, the book touches on most everything related to, yes, existence. Brin's imagination is rather amazing. The book is worth reading just for that. And, the first contact idea in Existence doesn't fit any of the standard SF tropes that I know of. It is quite an unusual and interesting idea.
Conclusion: While Existence doesn't tell as good a story as some of Brin's earlier books (for example, Startide Rising and The Uplift War), it is still a good read, especially for those who like hard SF.
