Great novel, well deserving of the 1991 Hugo, though it lost to Bujold's The Vor Game. It lost the SF Chronicle award and the Locus to Simmon's The Fall of Hyperion. All of these are great SF and I'd be hard pressed to chose among them. I give Earth 9 of 10 stars, very good, not perfect.50 years in the future an extinction level event threatens the Earth. Noble laureate Alex and his many cronies have to figure out how to save us all using hard science, Maori mysticism, primate social behavior an...

I was trying to describe this book to people at my book club last night, and as I went through all the things it tried to incorporate, one person asked if this was a humourous book? It is not, but I can see how the hodge-podge I was listing might make it sound like a book where piling all these themes and technologies were be used to highlight absurdity.Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision...

My rating for this book probably suffers from my method of reading it—15 to 20 minute bursts while on coffee break at work. It’s a sci-fi thriller and reading only 20-30 pages per day really stretched out the action in a non-thrilling way.It is also a little heavy on the hard science fiction side of things for my tastes—remember, I am primarily a fantasy reader! There’s an awful lot of mathematical calculations, envisioning the Earth’s core, and talk of gravity and fundamental particles. Not tha...

This book is a treasure. It drastically changed my worldview and made me come to see the urgency of some of the issues facing our generation. One of Brin's concepts has actually become a major piece of my belief system. Besides all of this serious stuff....this is a damn fun book to read that you will not put down until you are finished!

This is a long book that is rich with ideas and concepts. It's set about fifty years into the future from 1990 and you can already see a number of his predictions come true. It's not a page turner. The pace is slow, leisurely. It's a thoughtful book. It took me a long time to read it because I typically didn't read more than a few pages at a time. I also frequently remarked on passages to my wife because Brin's ideas on things seem to match mine pretty well.

Bloated. Dated. Sexist. Skip it; read literally any other climate fiction.

This was the second time I read this book, and I liked it better this round.It's fast-paced action with a strong ecological message. Although it was published pre-internet (1990), it anticipates much of the immediacy of instant communications. Unfortunately, the situation with the environment hasn't gotten better, and we'll have to face many of the challenges this book portrays.I especially liked the author's explanation of the assumptions he made and the points he exaggerated. He's a great stor...

Earth, the blue marble.This book, a marvel.No, the above statement(s) wasn't meant to be poetic - but it's utterly true.Where to begin in summing up this book …A young and brilliant scientist has created an itty-bitty tiny artificial black hole … and lost it "somewhere" in the center of the planet. While he is looking for it together with some allies, earthquakes start shaking the planet and a space station is lost. The reason is rather awesome ((view spoiler)[because I had thought of a lot of p...

I'll preface this review by mentioning that I've been in love with this book ever since I first read it when it came out. I loved it so much that it rode my top three books of all time for many, many years, and I even jumped at the chance to meet the author in a speech he made about the transparent society and I even cornered him afterward to let him know how much I appreciated him.This was in the mid-'90s shortly after Glory Season had come out.I just said, "Mr. Brin, I just wanted to let you k...

Dang those profligate "TwenCen" forebears of ours! They went and burned off the ozone layer and depleted the water tables and used up all the petroleum, and consequently just a few decades later people lead stunted lives, devoid of privacy and required by law to maintain a near-zero environmental footprint. Those who are smart wear goggles to protect their vision from "sleeting ultraviolet radiation" (and also to record, and to upload if they wish, whatever they see). That's the background situa...

3.5 Stars. There is much to admire about this 1990-vintage panorama of Earth in the 50-year future (at the time of writing). From our vantage point, ~20 years into that predicted future, many of the deeply disturbing trends are playing out along very similar lines as those predicted in the book. Equally important, a lot of mostly-positive trends are also falling more or less into place. In many ways, the predictive power of this book is quite remarkable.I was also impressed by the ambitious scop...

Sad to say, this book was a clunker. It looked promising in the beginning--like it was going to be a parable about the dark side of technological progress. And it might have worked, had Brin kept his story on a smaller scale, focusing on the effect an abused planet was having on a few people. Unfortunately, he decided to attempt writing an epic, with the result that there were too many characters involved in too many subplots that I couldn't very invested in.Given the fact that the book was publ...

Started this last night as a break from "War and Peace." We'll see how it goes. Already there's a potential disaster caused by a super-collider thingee. People have been protesting the existence of those dubious contraptions. There was one in "Angels and Demons" as I recall. Moving in a bit after last night. As with "War and Peace" there are several plot trains running here. As is common with sci-fi, especially so-called "hard" sci-fi, the ideas are interesting while the writing is merely functi...

This is not an easy read in spite of the well written, accessible prose, some good characterization, and some exciting scenes. The difficulty is due to the ambitious scope of the book which seems to necessitate numerous plot strands, myriad characters, and frequent expositions and infodumps. Personally I am not wired for reading nonfiction, I am always grateful to novelists who manage to impart some new knowledge to me packaged in their fiction. Indeed, I am also grateful to David Brin for the b...

Author David Brin just posted a link to a video where he does a reading from Earth. But, this is not just a talking head video. [image error]Brin's bookshelves and some kitchen appliances are visible in the background, but they will not distract because the reading is illustrated w/fade-ins to terrific astronomical spacescape photography and art, and not randomly either, but in synch with the passage Brin reads. Brilliant, fun, and much better than those origins of earth and the universe films y...

David Brin is one of those hard Science Fiction writers who know the art of writing stories. He has characters that are flesh and blood; he gives good details of the scene before us without causing anemia in the telling. One irritation of many books, especially many found in the New York Times Best Seller List, is that the story and characters are so skeleton, if you were to blow on the page, perhaps the words themselves would float away in the wind for what little story and art there is betwee

I read this in a college environmental science class, early 1990s. I remember it talking about the "world wide web" and email, and thinking "no way!!"

It's the year 2038, and Earth ain't doin' so well. The planet is overheated and overpopulated. Economies have failed; income inequality is rampant. And somewhere, deep inside the earth, a technological innovation has gone awry as an artificial black hole may eat the planet from the inside out.Hard Sci-Fi in a NutshellEarth was published in 1990, and it's set in 2038. This dates the book occasionally, but, as with all aging science fiction, it's interesting to see what the author was and wasn't a...

The Large Hadron Collider is doing pretty well this early into its life. It has already produced compelling evidence for the existence of a Higgs boson. And it hasn’t produced a microscopic black hole that would sink into the centre of the Earth and devour us all. Yet.David Brin wrote Earth around the same time I was born, long before the LHC was being built and its doomsayers were crying disaster. Even then, however, the idea of experimental physics creating a world-swallowing black hole was a

Reread. But kind of exhausting. Too many ideas and in the end kind of fell over. But it had some details that stayed with me me for years. Looking for a rock in Kansas. Editing 80s sf movies to be 15 minutes long. The gnomes of zurich kind of. A black hole at the center of the Earth? And using Shuttle Down as a detail. And something about a manifestation of Gaia in some manner. And a floating country of environmental refugees. That's a lot for me to have remembered and rightly so. I also recalle...