I love David Brin's books. Normally. I really do. I need to go back and review more of them here.Anyway, this is not a good book. There are good seed ideas here, but if anything 2 stars is generous.The core premise is that the world is a little further ahead in time than we are now. Huge disparity between the rich and the poor, conflict over power and control, all sorts of things we are dealing with now but intensified. Into this mix comes an astronaut cleaning up earth's orbit who finds an alie...

Existence is a couple short stories, a couple essays and an old Usenet post woven into a longer framing novella, most dealing with transhumanism and the Fermi paradox -- if we're not the only intelligence in the galaxy, then why can't we see signs of the others?I didn't know that a good portion of the novel -- its short stories and some of the essays -- had been published before until I got to the end, where Brin explains it and I have my "aha!" moment -- so THAT'S why there were so many dropped...

This is a big book with a lot of big ideas. The time is the mid 21st century and the world has become wired in a way that involves constant virtual reality. AI's are crossing the line between smart computers and true sentience. In the midst of these changes, a space garbage collector discovers an odd object that turns out to be an alien space probe.I loved the ideas in the story and the way the story kept moving in directions I didn't expect. What does it mean if we aren't alone in the universe?...

If I had to reduce this book to a few epigraphs, they’d be: The relentless drive of evolution drives on relentlessly. Deception is sometimes a darn good reproductive strategy. So is competition.So is cooperation. Being sentient means we have some influence on which strategy we use. But not as much as we’d like to believe. This is Big Book written by a master of Big Ideas. An astronaut with a helper monkey finds a crystal seed in orbit. Turns out it one of billions, maybe more, that other intelli...

Oh dear! I used to really admire David Brin. The first three books in his “Uplft Universe” are among the all-time greats (at least, in my reckoning). “Earth” is truly outstanding. “Existence” . . . . Sorry, Dr Brin – this one just doesn't make the grade.Of course, having said that I must now attempt to justify my position. Well firstly let's cover the good bits. The background is a near future, extrapolated from current trends and is in the best traditions of 'hard' SF. So far so good, and an ar...

this giant tome turns out to be at least half a dozen old stories the author wrote a decade or more ago and now mashed together like they were all one story of unrelated people and events.i only kept going thinking there was going to be some way it all came together in some amazing way. it did not. a few of the stories were completely unrelated to the main story of the book. like red herrings. 100's of pages of red herrings.like another reviewer here wrote, it was as if brin was determined to wr...

(Originally published on my blog: http://mybiochemicalsky.wordpress.com...)After ten years of absence, David Brin is finally back with a new novel. Reading Existence, it is not difficult to imagine how that monster of a book took so much time to write. It is huge, not merely in terms of word count, but also in terms of conceptual volume. Brin’s 1990 book Earth is a similar creature – teeming with predictions, explorations and interpretations of the near future, ultimately succeeding on most leve...

I’ve been trying to catch up on classic science fiction as of late. Recently, I read through Isaac Asimov’s I Robot collection, which was written to an audience with a different set of expectations than readers today. Fifty-plus years ago, science fiction was largely a genre of ideas — where plot and characters took a back seat to shear innovation. In I Robot, the short stories serve mainly as a series of logic puzzles that explore the what-ifs of robot psychology. Today’s reader, on the other h...

Clear the decks. A new book from David Brin goes to the top of the stackOK, half way through now, and I think this is the most enjoyable book from Mr Brin in a long time. Some is familiar to me (Hacker's story), but so much is new, and often i will finish a section and just think about the ideas that come through. As a bookseller, I cannot wait to introduce customers to this book. (And hopefully, most of his backlist.)Finished. What a great book. It was worth the wait. It kept me hooked until th...

The story of “Existence”, Brins first novel in about ten years I think, is a complex multi character, multi idea, multi side story based rather complex super hard sci fi work about deception. Again, this is hard SF. It is as far from any soapy space opera you can come and the wide variety of characters in the story includes (among others) a Chinese slum family, a Rastafarian pop-scientist (really cool by the way, wish we could have seen more of him), an author, a super intelligent news reporter

Big ideas, good science fiction, frustrating styleThe story starts out slow and I was tempted to stop listening several time in the first few chapters. I recommend you keep going, a lot of interesting things will eventually happen. Unfortunately a lot of very uninteresting things also happen. It is almost like Brin had a goal of writing over 500 pages and was not going to let the fact that he only had 300 pages of material stop him.On the plus side, the book has lots of great science fiction mat...

This is a massive brain-dump from Brin with lots of rough edges, but worth the read.I really liked that Brin set out to tackle the near future with tons of political and technological predictions, but a lot of it was annoying also in the first few chapters. Much of the future jargon comes of as anachronistic and silly instead (is anyone going to use 'trilly' for trillionaire?), and characters who are supposed to be older in the future setting while would have to be kids growing up right now in 2...

This is one of the hardest books to talk about and rate because on the one hand it is very ambitious, the author put a lot of time and thought into it and it is the kind of sf I really would love more, but on the other hand I found about 90% of the book so misguided and infuriating that I felt like slagging it badly and giving it the rare 1 star rating I reserve for the truly atrocious novels from one point or another. Below are some raw thoughts on why:Let's start with the Afterword where after...

I wanted to love Existence out of respect for David Brin and his previous works. Overall it enjoys a rich setting inhabited by interesting but fairly uncomplicated characters who are driven by an overwrought plot more than internal motivations. The concepts and conflicts are compelling and interesting, but the narrative fails to engage fully. The first half of the book is the problem,in my view, as there is entirely too much detail put into what are essentially tangents related to politics. Insi...

First of all, Brin is among the foremost respected science-fiction authors on the market today. His stories have the power of an Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series. Yet, like Clarke, Brin seems to have jumped the metaphorical shark (or dolphin, as the case may be). Put simply, this book is not much more than a re-hash of previously published stories (he follows their publication dates in the afterword to magazines to the early 80s) and stale characterization. Moreover, it's boring. I canno...

Sandi's review nails it when she writes "Existence is a giant mess of a novel."At its heart, this is another attempt to resolve Fermi's paradox, which asks the question, "Where is everybody?" The basic resolution is reminiscent of Alastair Reynolds's in his Revelation Space series. And I liked that aspect of the novel, and, if Brin had contained himself to that story, then I might have been be able to give it that extra star.But he doesn't. This book is all over the map with multiple story lines...

While more essayistic and less intense than Earth, Existence reinforces David Brin's position as one of my favorite writers and thinkers. With the exception of another David (Zindell), I cannot think of a contemporary who has envisioned better and brighter futures, over and over again. At the Human Library, we're about to announce a contest for short stories looking at precisely these kinds of futures--and looking for the ways to get there. Both Brin and Zindell are at the top of our list of rec...

I fell in love with David Brin back in 1985 when a co-worker turned me on to Startide Rising. That book was so phenomenal, I started reading every book I could get my hands on. I loved it all. In 1993, I was able to go to a book signing for Glory Season. I found that Brin is an extremely well-read man who manages to juggle an astounding number of ideas in his head. In 2002, he released Kiln People, I book that took me a couple of attempts to get through and which I really disliked. However, I co...

I found this a very disappointing book after all the hype from the transhumanist community about Brin and the constant appearance of the book on my social media.There is some interesting and innovative thinking here (although perhaps less so to anyone who has actually 'worked' Second Life'). Brin can also write well about character in short bursts.This is overwhelmed by the standard faults of contemporary scifi - too many ideas not taken to a conclusion, an inability to take a stand that is not

An alien artefact is found orbiting the Earth and salvaged. The astronaut who found it became famous mostly because the Artefact seems to respond to the first one who touched it. Inside there are several species of aliens and humanity is trying to establish a communication with them.50 pages in and I said to myself: I have found another favorite, yey! However, my excitement didn’t last long. Such a promising idea lost on the way because:1. There are too many side PoV which add nothing to the sto...