Existence

Aug 04, 2012 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: being-human, evolution, gods-need-worship, hero-s-journey, metatexts, science-fiction

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...more 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 intelligent species have sent into the cosmos to say “We are here! Join us! Pass it on!” The gifts of the beneficent cosmos. And the viruses of a malignant one. Enough seeds were sent out by enough worlds that selection pressure came to bear millions of years ago. Reproductive success does not equal folks you want in decision-making positions.

This book has characters, but it’s not really about them. They carry the story like we carry and modify the DNA that passes through time in our bodies. All the people we follow, except maybe the Michael Crichton figure, are good and generous people, on the right side of history to the best of their abilities. The not-Crichton character may have good intentions, but he is willing to use deception and betrayal to accomplish them. Again, time honored reproductive strategies. They work with crystal encapsulated intelligences. Which is sort of a “duh” now that I come to think of it.

The book has its frustrations. There are lots of pieces that aren’t clearly connected. There was a US Senator with an addiction to outrage that I would have loved to have seen played out; a terrorist doctor with a heart of gold who left the narrative way to fast; non-human sentient beings I wanted to know so much better. Much of the action happens off the page, and I never did figure out what Awful Day was. This is not so much a book with a beginning, middle, and end as a book that carries a piece of possible future history from one arbitrary point to another.

That may not be fair. We start with a crystal seed carrying information; we end with a crystal seed carrying information. This book is a cheerleader for the idea of doing good things with that information; be more generous than we have to be. Build the United Federation of Planets. There are many moments of courageous generosity, from a steward on a zeppelin to a Chinese peasant in a sunken city that turned out to save the world.

The last line in the afterword put a tear in my eye. “We aren’t a curse upon the world. We are her new eyes. Her brain, testes, ovaries . . . her ambition and her heart. Her voice. So sing.” (556). This I believe. Or, at least, I want to.
(less)

like 4 likes · see review

Aug 07, 2012 Alexander Popov rated it 4 of 5 stars

(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...more

like 5 likes · see review

Jun 24, 2012 Tamahome is currently reading it

Read it for an hour, and only got 20 pages off. Small font or dense prose. It resembles a school textbook. Seems pretty dazzing, at least the parts I understand. I like it when a book is just a little bit over my head. It would take me about 26 hours to finish the compact 553 pages. Think of the book as really having about 774 pages.

Virtual page multiplier *1.4

I'm tempted to get the ebook, but it looks like this book has a variety of font effects and even some diagrams, which tend to look worse...more

like 3 likes · see review

May 01, 2013 Mårten Ericson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more 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 (later becoming a cyborg like entity), a Neanderthal girl, synthetic self-aware aliens, a jet-set space junkie and much more.

I will not go into analysing or rating David Brins writing techniques since he is in fact already a very accomplished writer, and the continuous publication of his books will have to stand as a quality stamp on his authorship. However, his contemporary writing in “Existence” in fact reminded me a lot of that of William Gibson and the world that Brin portraits has much in common with that “cyberpunk”, “always online” “fully embedded” world so often pictured by Mr Gibson.

Unfortunately Brin also picks up another of Gibsons less appealing traits. Sometimes you simply have no idea what the heck the current chapter is about or what relation it has to the main story. To make it worse, in the end of the book the reader is forced to recognise that many of the side plots didn't really have a meaning at all – nor are they concluded in any apparent meaningful way. One can only wonder why Brin has made it such, or why the editor let it slip through, but in the end this enormous work clearly has the feel of a great synthesis of smaller stories rather than a dense monograph.

Now, for those readers interested in the first contact problem, or the fact that to date there is no extra-terrestrial contact, this book is on the other hand a goldmine of intellectual sharpness, debate and dissection of the aforesaid problem. Honestly I think there are single pages in the beginning of the book that is worth the whole amount that I paid for it.

Also Brin offer an apparent connection to the uplift theme of his best known novels (see the Uplift trilogy – “Sundiver”, “Startide rising” and “The uplift war”), though I should say that as the story unfolds, the evolution of it does not really lead towards the universe of these earlier stories. In fact Brin expands his uplift idea to embrace surrogate births for Neanderthals, extensive cyborg/prosthesis usage and civil rights for the Ai community. As far as my taste goes it becomes a bit too much really, Brin is trying to fit too much in the story (or the world), and the universe in “Existence” does not really portrait a future that I agree with, nor find enormously interesting. However that is not to say that our future might not turn out in a similar way.

One last significant drawback is that the book is too long. Not so that the six hundred and fifty pages are too much per se, but the main story stops at about page 490 and what comes after that really should have been the material for a book of its own. (Read – Brin should have thought about the final events more thoroughly). If the book actually had stopped at this point I would probably have given it 5 stars, but as it is now, the extreme complexity and variety of themes and characters in the end becomes too much for Brin to handle and several of the characters in the story simply disappears in the time-gap between part six and seven of the book. Thus the end does not fully connect to its opening problem, the driving theme of the story. It does not really answer the questions put forward earlier. Thus David Brins "Existence" will only get 4 well-earned stars.
(less)

like 1 like · see review

Feb 27, 2012 Martin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Clear the decks. A new book from David Brin goes to the top of the stack

OK, 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...more

like 9 likes · see review

Apr 08, 2013 Marc Huete rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is perhaps better categorized under philosophy. As an adventure, it maybe cuts three stars. The pacing is a bit slow, the screen time is divided among so many characters it's hard to really connect with any of them, and there's not a lot of scenes I'd consider exciting. Probably a quarter of the book is "non-fiction" excerpts or concepts.

However, it answers the Fermi paradox, and the problems of travelling in a no warp-drive universe. It brings up a lot of questions to mull over, and a...more

like · see review

Apr 06, 2013 Samuel Lubell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

I like big idea science fiction and this book had ideas in spades. Yes it has flaws, there are too many viewpoint characters and the dolphin/Uplift plotline went on too long if it was just a nod to his most popular series but was dropped 2/3rds of the way into the book. The jump of a couple of decades means the effort of the rich super-elites to reimpose feudalism and the confrontation between the first two alien objects found are both summarized rather than shown even though most of the previou...more

like · see review

Apr 05, 2013 Tim Pendry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: consciousness, cultural-studies, north-american, popular-culture, science-fiction

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...more

like · see review

Mar 27, 2013 Nick Hall rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cyberpunk, science-fiction, spiritual

I'd just been laid up in bed after a (routine) operation for about 5 days and read 6 science fiction books. After this one I had to get up because I knew that anything else I read after it would feel flat and uninteresting. This was the most enjoyable thing I've read in that genre for years. Spot on the mark for being up to speed with modern paradigms/technology and philosoph-ethical conundrums, all woven into a hard and gutsy plot; and with some good characters. I really can't praise it enough....more

like 1 like · see review

Mar 13, 2013 Angela Robertson rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi

I liked a lot of the science fiction in this book, but it felt much too abstract for me. In fact, it took me longer than usual to even get 'interested' in the story. Usually, with a new book, I'll dive right in and become engrossed with the characters within the first few chapters. With Existence, I don't think it was until around chapter 25 that I decided I would stick it out until the end. Up to that point, I was considering not reading the entire thing.

Part of the difficulty might be that I w...more

like · see review

Jan 25, 2013 Alan Denham rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: just-paper

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...more 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 area in which David Brin normally excels. There are a lot of good solid cultural references, believable and well-rounded characters, plenty of set pieces in credible scenarios . .
So what went wrong?
There are too many shifts and reverses. The basic scenario (discovering alien artefacts) is good, but we are presented with the problem of resolving the aliens' motivations. This is a potential minefield, because there is no guarantee that humans could ever understand alien motivations – and Brin admits this - but then he gives us a lead – and then shows it is incorrect – and then does that again – and again . . . .too many shifts in the paradigms! This may be realistic, but it doesn't make for a good story.
Then there is the inclusion of the autie characters. If autism is to be used as a major component of a novel, it needs to be handled carefully. The reader needs to know about the author's view of autism, and needs to be helped to develop some sympathy with the character(s). This was not well done.
And the nice ideas that were never developed – we open with a space jockey working a teleoperated 'garbage collector' system, clearing junk from low orbit – and he has a capuchin monkey as companion/assistant. Now there is an idea worth playing with – but it gets very little development. Partly-uplifted dolphins were in there as well – but after reading books from the Uplift Universe, the ones we have here are pallid things, lacking development. And repeated references to 'Awfulday' but never a full account of what must have been quite a major disaster. And the 'messenger parrot' that self destructs . . .
And (sorry, Dr Brin) there was the length. I read this in paperback, and it ran to 550 pages. It would have made a good 250 page book. Maybe 350. Beyond 350 I admit I was not reading every word. Beyond 450 I wasn't even reading every paragraph – I was just waiting for the end.
And finally, there are the liberties taken with the English language. Now I don't normally have many problems with minor tweaks to Standard English where the tweaks help to give the reader a clear lead – but this book has a few things that frankly grated. One is the repeated (frequently repeated!) insertion of 'ai' into words (examples: an 'aice' reporter, 'eyes and ears' becoming 'ais and eairs', various sorts of 'wair', meetings with aiwitnesses, and a wearable digaisisstant) to inform the reader that the item in question is electronically enhanced to AI level, or something close to that. The first two or three of these that I noticed I thought “OK, nice way of doing it”. But the last-quoted of those was only page 30, and by then I was finding it rather overdone. Eventually, it grated. The second problem was the thin underline of the occasional word or phrase. It took me a while to work out that this probably indicates a hyperlink – though whether a link to a glossary in an electronic version of this book, or a part of the fictional world was never made sufficiently clear. Reading it on paper, these things are just 'mildly irritating' – and that is not what I wanted from a book. Brin also introduces an acronym “waist” (Wow, ain't it strange that . . .”) that (sorry) didn't work. If it had been used more consistently, or as part of a suite of similar acronyms (I had no trouble with Niven's “Tanj” or “Tanstafl”) then I could have been happy with this – but it didn't 'click'.
And one more item I just remembered – the change of font. This can be a neat way of changing viewpoints, or establishing context – but this time (like so many other things in this book) it didn't work.
So in final conclusion – I am glad I got this as a Christmas present. If I had actually spent my own money on it, I would have been gravely disappointed. I finished it, so I suppose it deserves two stars – but if it hadn't had David Brin's name on it, I would probably have given up halfway through, or even earlier.
(less)

like 6 likes · see review

Jan 16, 2013 JBradford rated it 5 of 5 stars

So far as I can recall, I have never read anything by David Brin before, but I will definitely be looking for others of his works. It seems just a short while ago that I declared I did not give five-star ratings to fictional novels, but I seem to have done that a few times over the past couple years, and I certainly have to do so here. Having said that, I have no doubt at all that most people would not agree; most people, in fact, would say I am out of my mind. That is certainly true of most of...more So far as I can recall, I have never read anything by David Brin before, but I will definitely be looking for others of his works. It seems just a short while ago that I declared I did not give five-star ratings to fictional novels, but I seem to have done that a few times over the past couple years, and I certainly have to do so here. Having said that, I have no doubt at all that most people would not agree; most people, in fact, would say I am out of my mind. That is certainly true of most of my friends and casual acquaintances, a good percentage of whom would not have any truck with any science fiction novel, and I also suspect that many people who do read popular science fiction would get turned off quickly by this book. Despite that, I think it is one of the most impressive novels I have read in my lifetime.

The style that Brin uses here can be an easy turn-off for most people. His novel does not have chapters; it has parts — and each part is a small slice of writing, sometimes extending for several pages and sometimes taking up less than half a page. Each such slice is either a third person description of what happens to some character or a first-person account that varies from stream of consciousness to an actual third-person report from the viewpoint of a different character. Until the reader gets into the story, all these different slices seem chaotic and unrelated, but eventually the action starts coming together to present a cohesive picture of the overall story — a story, by the way, that occupies the better part of 100 years of time, during which the different characters meet each other and interact.

All of that is not excessively new, but what is new is that Brin establishes a picture of how society may have involved through the next century, extrapolating from countless things that go on in our current society to present a future that is both intriguing and horrifying. Nowadays, many of us are concerned with the way our children and young people carry on with cell phones and tablets, but few of us look into the future to see what the results of those practices are apt to become as technology continues to evolve. As described by Brin, communication between different people occurs through instant access to an Internet beyond our wildest dreams, accessed through a multitude of artificial intelligence machines — including, for example, a contact lens that lets the wearer see the world through different layers of reality, activated by dental switches, and connecting the wearer instantaneously to whoever wants to be connected. Furthermore, some people have gone beyond that point and had the micro-sized equipment actually installed in their eye, rather than bother with a contact. One prime user of this equipment is a young female reporter, Tor Povlov, who provides both video and audio feeds to an expanding base of followers and finds that she is becoming the control unit of an instantaneous flash mob whose collective research abilities and communicative powers result in the near instantaneous determination of answers to impossibly difficult questions. It is more than describing the equipment being used, however; Brin over the course of several vignettes involving Tor lets us see into her mind and to understand what it is like to live in that society.

Another aspect of the future world in which Tor lives is that language has changed to reflect many of the changes that have occurred in the interim between now and then. Since everyone in that future world, from the richest to the poorest, has access to some kind of artificial intelligence, for example, vocabulary has expanded to include a lot of words that reflect this different factor of their lives. In addition to all the new words, which most readers very possibly will find confusing, Brin has an irritating but natural process of filling in the missing century by oblique references that only suggest what happened. There are a great many references to Awful Day, for example, but we are never actually told what happened on that day, other than a suggestion that Washington DC and a few other American cities disappeared that day.

**************************
What really makes a novel, of course, is the story. And the story in Existence is an incredible one that twists in succeeding levels of consciousness as we see through the build up of all the slices of life what is happening … and then see that we actually understood very little … and then see in a new development that it was even more complex than we had thought. I did not see any simple way of telling you what that story is without spoiling some of the build up, unfortunately, so you will have to read it yourself to find out why I find it so exciting.
(less)

like 2 likes · see review

Dec 01, 2012 Gwern rated it 4 of 5 stars

_Existence_ is best-seen as a rewrite of _Earth_, and _Earth_ was a sprawling futurological serious novel which was trying to both world-build by including countless perspectives and quotes and discussions and terms but also put them into context to build a overarching thesis. Similar to Tad William's _Otherland_ (the fantastic first book _City of Golden Shadow_, not the horrible sequels), Dos Passos's _USA_, or particularly Brunner's _Stand On Zanzibar_ (to which Brin alludes, actually, in havi...more _Existence_ is best-seen as a rewrite of _Earth_, and _Earth_ was a sprawling futurological serious novel which was trying to both world-build by including countless perspectives and quotes and discussions and terms but also put them into context to build a overarching thesis. Similar to Tad William's _Otherland_ (the fantastic first book _City of Golden Shadow_, not the horrible sequels), Dos Passos's _USA_, or particularly Brunner's _Stand On Zanzibar_ (to which Brin alludes, actually, in having a alien say "what an imagination I've got.")

The overriding theme is, of course, the Great Silence. Brin's solution, characteristically for a guy who wants to be the ultimate moderate and more moderate than thou, is to take up every solution: the Great Silence is due to more efficient physical transportation *and* memetic viruses *and* Berserkers *and* Lurkers *and* panspermia *and* ecological collapse *and* nuclear war *and*... This is a little impressive to behold, and overall, I did enjoy reading the book. Brin has had a few new ideas since _Earth_ like the smart-mob.

But for the bad:

This jumping makes the book something like a huge primer on the Great Silence/Fermi's Question, yes, but *also* for something of a mess of a book. The book is huge, but a good deal of the bulk is fat and self-indulgent:

1. the dolphin sub-plot is rehashed Uplift material, which only very charitably has any relevance to anything else in the book (I thought that we would at least see them towards the end on spaceships as a token nod toward justifying the time spent on them, but no!)
2. More germane subplots feel incomplete; the autistic kids, "cobblies" and the "Basque Chimera" form one such oddly underjustified subplot - is this a thing, now, lauding crippled autistic kids as secret savant heroes? I don't know which narrative is more denigrating of the human suffering involved, the standard one or this one. (Austism spectrum may be useful in some areas, but only a *little* is necessary and even the high-functioning often fail: I read in the _New York Times_ the other day that that famous tech firm which uses autistic workers has a 5/6 rejection rate of applicants just from the start. One must sift a lot of sand.)
3. much material is borrowed from his previous nonfiction or fiction; allusions to _The Postman_ are well and good, but when I could predict the resolution of the Senator Strong mystery from the instant we were told it was an addiction... This also means that I can track how many authorial mouthpieces there are in the novel, and it's pretty much all of them. Even people you think are wrong like Hamish are just acting as conduits for Brin's own beliefs. This leads to the severe problem, in a repeated first contact novel, that none of the aliens were remotely alien, and the humans all seemed pretty similar to each other too. It made me wish for Stanislaw Lem, or at least Watts's _Blindsight_.

Brin also has a very weird attitude towards what he calls extropianism but most people these days just call transhumanism. For example, the bogus anti-caloric restriction argument Hamish gives; it is bogus because (a) none of those monks or monasteries are following nutritionally balanced diets, indeed, usually for religious reasons they're following highly unbalanced diets if they're not like the Taoists possibly actively poisoning themselves with mercury, and (b) the records do claim countless instances of extreme longevity, which of course we don't believe because record-keeping was terrible - which means the evidence is so worthless and biased and corrupt that we can't use it to claim the opposite either! I've told Brin this like twice before, not that he cared. But by the time the story is set, the caloric restriction question will be settled: the primate studies will be finished, the human CRers will be dead, and the underlying biochemistry (or lack thereof) will have been elucidated. Suppose he's wrong? He probably doesn't care, he's dead-set against it anyway! I was a little awe-struck when he has his mouthpiece badmouth cryonics, *after saying it worked and there had been revivals*? WTF?

WTF indeed. This attitude could be called schizophrenic. Throughout the novel, Brin seems to struggle with the fundamental problem posed by Vinge: how does he keep the story human given his belief in progress and his basic acceptance of the Strong AI thesis? He never comes up with a good answers, but blatantly hand-waves them away: an emulated rat brain goes critical and escapes into the Internet? Well, uh - nothing happens because I say so (wow, ain't it strange)! There are even more AIs pervading the world, controlling countless key functions? Well, uh - nothing happens because I insinuate something about parents and children and them being grateful! (wow, ain't it strange - ever see a grateful river, spider, tow-truck, computer...? Humans can barely be grateful, ever.) Humanity is a few decades away from a general nanofactory assembler in his story and thousands of crystal probes come to visit? Well, uh - the crystal probes are completely inactive and don't carry nanofactories or *anything* despite it being a mindbogglingly great & evolutionarily fit idea and perfectly doable for them, because I say so and it lets me write adventure arcs with primates fighting over & chucking around glowing rocks! (wow, ain't it strange) He'll mock the extropians in the first part for believing in cryonics or uploads or AIs even though the most-criticized belief, cryonics, has been vindicated 100% in his story even beyond their hopes, their expectations of uploads are equally justified by events towards the end - non-destructive uploading, even! we'd settle for destructive uploads at this point... and so on and so forth. Well, uh - they're right but they're wrong, don't you see! (wow, ain't it strange)(less)

like · see review

Nov 07, 2012 Sandi rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, audiobooks, sci-fi

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...more 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 considered that a one-off and have spent 10 years waiting for him to redeem himself. Well, the wait was over in June of this year and it wasn't worth it.

Existence is a giant mess of a novel. I don't know how the editing process was left out. You can tell that Brin is one of those super-intelligent people who has a lot of ideas and a lot to say. However, he didn't need to try cramming it all into one novel. There isn't any subject matter he doesn't tackle in this book, usually in long-running commentary that has nothing to do with the story. He has too many POV characters and plot lines. He drops characters and their stories without resolution. 3/4 of the way into the book, he jumps ahead 26 years and it becomes a totally different book. Like I said, it's a giant mess. There were some story lines I really enjoyed, but he would just drop them and not go back.

In some ways, this seems to be a prequel to the Uplift series, but it's different enough to not be. I'm really not sure what he intended with the throwaway uplift plot that was only semi-followed. I would have liked to have seen more of that.

As far as the audio production goes, I have to say that Robin Miles is one of the best female narrators out there. She can bring just about anything to life and more than carried her sections. The male narrators were a different story. One of them was okay and one was just awful. I don't know which was which though because I've never hear either of them before. The one who did the Hamish and Gerald sequences was really terrible. He'd read really fast and you could hear him suck in his breath when he ran out of air in the middle of sentences. It was really annoying. Towards the end, Hamish meets up with a male Jamaican professor and the narrator is so terrible that Robin Miles has to step in and do the professor's dialogue. It was really disturbing considering the character was male and she's obviously female. If the male narrator couldn't do a Jamaican accent, just an ordinary voice would have been less disturbing.

I probably would have given this one star if it weren't for the fairly interesting premise and for Robin Miles' outstanding performance. Sadly, I am probably never going to buy any of David Brin's books again. This was just too disappointing.(less)

like 7 likes · see review

Sep 10, 2012 Bee rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, classic-sci-fi, near-future-scifi, science-fiction

Existence by David Brin. Good book, I really disliked enjoyng it. I put it down to finish a great read, Red Seas Under Red Skies, which was awesome. But this book wormed it's way into my heart. The characters also slowly grew on me. If I could compare it to anything it would be Accelerando, they are both intensely conceptual, are run more n the strength of these mad concepts that an actual story, but of the two i really enjoyed Existance more.

Both take todays social media based tech and ever di...more

like · see review

Aug 14, 2012 Brenda rated it 2 of 5 stars

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...more

like 6 likes · see review

Aug 12, 2012 Allen Massey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Big ideas, good science fiction, frustrating style

The 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...more Big ideas, good science fiction, frustrating style

The 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 material, ancient aliens, machine intelligence's, high tech gadgets, and exploration of the solar system. It even has some very good characters (Human and alien). I also found his plan for how other intelligent races would contact and interact with whatever life exists in the our galaxy to be novel and well reasoned. It explains very nicely why we don't see any evidence of life when look out into the Milky Way.

Of course there are also some problems, for some reason Brin is not able to simply tell what should have been a great story. Instead he is constantly interrupting the story with whole chapters that have no relevance to the story or even any real purpose. To make it worse when reading one of the chapters that does tell the story he will invariable end the chapter as if it was the last show of the season for an action adventure series on TV. Ever one of these chapters will end with the narrator saying something like "and then she saw something that will forever change the way we think of the universe" or "then something unimaginable came around the corner" . The chapter then ends and we get 40 pages about something completely different (different characters, different plot line). By the time Brin gets back to the main plot I have almost forgot where the story left off. I can forgive an author for leaving the reader hanging once or twice, it helps to build suspense. But by the tenth or fifteenth time Brin does this is just annoying. It happens so often and with such ham-fisted prose, it becomes laughable which totally breaks the mood of the story.

Brin also goes to extraordinary ends to include elements of his Uplift books in the story. Even though they add nothing and actually impede the story. It is almost as if he had a bet with his publisher that he could include 5 chapters about Uplift without making it seem like an unrelated story. I assume he lost the bet.

Even with all the problems I am still going to recommend the book, just because I liked the big ideas the book presents. (less)

like 4 likes · see review

Aug 05, 2012 Burgoo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

Existence is a big book. Not just in page count, though at 500+ pages, it certainly qualifies as a door stopper. But big in ideas, scope, and ambition. It was reportedly a decade or so in the making, and the work shows in the result.

The setup is quite simple. Later in the 21st century, a space garbage man stumbles across an alien artifact. The exact nature of this artifact and its ramifications are impossible to get into without major spoilers. Suffice it to say that this is the springboard that...more

like · see review

Aug 04, 2012 Niall rated it 4 of 5 stars

David Brin has been too long absent from the list of New Publications, but he is back, and on form! This is science fiction doing what it does best - asking questions about what it means to be human, and about what we are doing wrong and could do better. This is what I expect from my science fiction: if I haven't been made to think, I've been wasting my time.

Earth touched on the Fermi Paradox (roughly: since it seems likely that intelligent life is common in the universe, where is everybody?), b...more

like 2 likes · see review

Jul 27, 2012 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

This is one of the densest books I've read recently, both for better and worse.

The good: There's a rousing story here, with numerous subplots, characters, and ideas. It has everything but the kitchen sink: a near-ish future with plenty of personal virtual technology; AI; uploaded personalities; alien contact; Neanderthals reconstructed from old DNA; Uplifted dolphins (a homage to Brin's Uplift series, but not the same universe); autistic savants who are almost a separate advanced species (they'...more This is one of the densest books I've read recently, both for better and worse.

The good: There's a rousing story here, with numerous subplots, characters, and ideas. It has everything but the kitchen sink: a near-ish future with plenty of personal virtual technology; AI; uploaded personalities; alien contact; Neanderthals reconstructed from old DNA; Uplifted dolphins (a homage to Brin's Uplift series, but not the same universe); autistic savants who are almost a separate advanced species (they've always been here, but the world wasn't ready for them yet); an ongoing thread about the myriad ways civilizations can self-destruct; an elite cabal that rules the world (or tries to); there's even a quote from Richard Brautigan! One of the dozen or so main characters is a science fiction writer who probably represents someone--a frenemy of Brin's, or himself? The premise is this: A space-garbage collector finds an artifact that turns out to be an alien probe. Adventure and a lot of navel-gazing ensue. The adventure is colorful and satisfying.

The bad: Way too much navel-gazing. The first half (and more) of the book has an inordinate amount of exposition. There are whole recurring threads of it; various ideas on, I guess, civilization(s): history, dynamics, and how it can end or evolve. And some science, of course. It may be all relevant--it is, after all, the substance of the book--and interesting as well, but it makes for a slow read. Worse is when it's put into conversation between characters, who parrot stuff for the reader that they probably would not say to their fictional audience. (Did I mention the talking parrots that serve as secure communication devices? Kitchen sink.) This exposition comprises a large percentage of the dialogue (and almost all of the other parts) in the first two-thirds of the book. Then things pick up toward the end, and in fact progress goes at breakneck pace.

Also, on the bad side, I didn't find any of the main characters very sympathetic. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't know if it was intentional; I think Brin meant for the astronaut (or space-garbage collector) and the journalist whom circumstances turn into a cyborg, at the least, to be engaging. I found neither of them so. I liked the Chinese sea-scavenger couple better--but not all that much better. (I'm sure the science fiction writer was deliberately annoying and worse.) Yet, I ended up feeling disappointed that some of the characters' stories stopped when the book moved ahead chronologically.

All in all, the book was a satisfying read, and more and more so as I got deeper into it. Excellent science fiction (as always, with Brin), even if--or because?--it took my mind through more convoluted pathways than I prefer.

(less)

like 2 likes · see review

Jul 10, 2012 Marleen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Book received from Book Geeks.

In a near future (the 2050’s or there-abouts) everybody in the world is connected with each other and their surroundings through a virtual network, inter-active glasses and various implants. At this time, during which space exploration has been suspended, Gerald Livingstone is an astronaut whose job it is to collect and dispose of the space junk which can be found in huge amounts, orbiting our Earth. When he spots a strange and shiny object floating around, his curi...more Book received from Book Geeks.

In a near future (the 2050’s or there-abouts) everybody in the world is connected with each other and their surroundings through a virtual network, inter-active glasses and various implants. At this time, during which space exploration has been suspended, Gerald Livingstone is an astronaut whose job it is to collect and dispose of the space junk which can be found in huge amounts, orbiting our Earth. When he spots a strange and shiny object floating around, his curiosity gets the better of him and he makes the unauthorised effort to retrieve the item.
What appears to be a manufactured crystal seems to come to live when Gerald touches it. It turns out to be a sort of repository containing a large number of different aliens all of whom are competing to get Gerald’s and later the world’s attention. And although their message appears to be urgent they are very evasive when it comes to explaining themselves or their ultimate purpose.
At about the same time, Peng Xiang Bin, a young Chinese man desperately trying to build a life for himself, his partner and baby by scavenging the new coastline discovers a second crystal, one whose messenger claims that those inside the first crystal are liars.
With the whole world involved in the discussion about what to make of the aliens’ warnings and proposed solution, various people decide to take positions and push their personal causes.
There is Tor Povlov, a journalist whose body was destroyed in a terrorist attack who now operates on a cyber level with the aid of a virtual think-tank, Hamish Brookeman, the famous author of doomsday books who advocates an anti-technology course of action, and Lacey Donaldson-Sander one of the super-rich de-facto rulers of the world to name but a few. With everybody, including the aliens, having an agenda of their own, the big question is whether or not humanity is equipped to deal with and survive the alien’s arrival.

This book starts of very slow. The near-future-world has to introduced and build as do the various characters, their backgrounds and motivation. But even when the story does really kick off this still isn’t a quick read. The story is filled to the brim with facts, speculation and details which will prove important further on in the story. If the reader wants to fully appreciate this story they’d do well to take their time and try and absorb what is happening.

From the moment humanity discovers that the artefact aliens have a purpose of their own, a purpose that could destroy Earth the question becomes and remains who is outsmarting who? Are the humans smart enough to anticipate every trick in the aliens’ book or have the latter foreseen any attempts at foiling their purpose and is humanity destined to repeat mistakes made by other races?
It was this question and the fact that it never appears to get a definite answer that really got me invested in the story. There were times when I could see an ulterior motive before the characters in the book did and could only hope that they would come to the same conclusion. At other times those characters where way ahead of me, taking actions that filled me with dread but appeared to turn out for the best later on, although the question always remained; did they really find a safe solution or are they still being tricked into a false sense of security?

It is a shame that there are one or two story-lines that did not appear to serve a real purpose in the overall context of the book. For example, as much as I enjoyed the adventures of Hacker and his encounter with the dolphins I’m not sure why it had to be part of this story or what it was meant to illustrate that couldn’t be seen through any of the other story-lines. The prophet, Tenskwatawa, was another interesting character that got introduced in the early part of the story only to disappear again without having served any obvious purpose. And while the autistics and resurrected Neanderthals do seem to have a role to play later on in the story I can’t help feeling that a lot more could have been done with their storyline.
Maybe this book suffers from too much story. I can’t help feeling that the author had a host of great ideas and then tried to squeeze them all into one narrative. It is quite possible that spreading them out a bit would have lead to a more satisfying reading experience.
Overall though I was fascinated by the main story in this book from the moment it was fully introduced and I know that I will be thinking about it even now, after I read the last page. And any book that manages to capture my attention to such a degree deserves to be praised.
On a separate note, I loved the cover on this book and the 3-D picture it shows.
(less)

like · see review

Jun 30, 2012 Steven Mclain rated it 1 of 5 stars

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...more 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 cannot think of a harsher critique for a storyteller, but that's the simple truth. Since I read it on my kindle, I know exactly at what point it became interesting. 75% of the way into the book, my interest was piqued and I began to really wonder how Brin was going to write himself out of his holes. Then, to my everlasting horror and dismay, he completely side-stepped those holes by either writing the character out of the book entirely (ask yourself what happens to Hacker, Tor, or Peng Xiang Bin), or worse, answered them in exposition in another subplot, or worst of all, seems to have let them drop entirely. The difficulty of connecting emotionally to Brin's characters seems to lie in the fact that they are simply vehicles for expositing in the most hackneyed fashion whatever philosophy Brin puts in their mouth. Interspersed throughout, moreover, are asides, interviews, chapters or quotes from books, all to add the sense of milieu that this work demands. Indeed, the milieu is the star of this story--from an inventive near-future reality that blends multiple interactive real-time layers, to the advancement of a complex inter-relationship between human beings and AIs, even the cloning of a neanteral child (I thought to preface that statement with a spoiler warning, but even though it occupies much of the narrative, it does little to advance the plot). All told, the best part of this book was the world that Brin evokes, but setting is never a story and ultimately, this story about First Contact deserves no contact.

(less)

like 9 likes · see review

Jun 25, 2012 Peter rated it 3 of 5 stars

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...more

like 3 likes · see review

Jun 10, 2012 Stacey O'Neale rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review was completed by Michael Cummings, staff reviewer with the Fantasy Book Addict.

David Brin is an icon in science fiction, and for good reasons. Brin's imagination gave us works like the Kiln People, the Postman, and of course, the seminal Uplift War saga in all of its glory. In his latest novel, Existence, Brin takes us to the near future, a world where mankind has continued to make mistakes, but has also made attempts at progress. We start by meeting Gerald Livingston, an orbital gar...more

like · see review

Nov 27, 2012 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

I am revisiting David Brin after a long hiatus (no problems with Brin, just reading other things). The last two Brin books that I remember are Heart of the Comet and The Postman, both from the 80s, so I’m a bit behind.

It’s entirely possible that I am not seeing a lot of redundancy that others are, given that I have missed twenty years. However, I really enjoyed the book.

I agree with most of the common threads on these reviews: the stories seem sort of stitched together, interesting characters/t...more I am revisiting David Brin after a long hiatus (no problems with Brin, just reading other things). The last two Brin books that I remember are Heart of the Comet and The Postman, both from the 80s, so I’m a bit behind.

It’s entirely possible that I am not seeing a lot of redundancy that others are, given that I have missed twenty years. However, I really enjoyed the book.

I agree with most of the common threads on these reviews: the stories seem sort of stitched together, interesting characters/threads are dropped, and there seems to be an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach going on. I especially found the drop of the dueling stones/Chinese scavenger couple story very jarring.

However, I thought the stylistic approach was deliberate; a lot of the time I felt like I was surfing the web and getting things “as they happened,” from fragmented, highly biased points-of-view—just like our current blogs, fragmented news sources, virtual reality/gaming communities, Facebook, Twitter, etc…but more so.

I also liked the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to the “what constitutes a human?” question. It’s just like our current diversity question…but more so.

In short, I thought he was selectively amplifying current trends to let us experience what the future might be like, and subjectively I did experience something very interesting.

I also got a huge kick out of the embedded references. Totally aside from the obvious self-references, as well as to the clearly identified references to the greats from the “hard sci-fi” community present and past, I think he was giving a subtle shout-outs to other authors. Most particularly, Professor Noozone’s dreadlocks with artificial VR “eyes” look a lot like Octavia Butler’s Oankali tentacles, both in form and function. The crystal entity worlds where beings can become smaller and satisfy their needs by wish alone, or work very hard to approach “reality” in larger shape, bear a striking resemblance to the Hell and Heaven in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce.

Oh, and "expecto simakus cliffordiam!" A two-fer.
(less)

like 1 like · see review

Aug 25, 2012 Rex Schrader rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A massive tome filled with big ideas. Like Brin's "Earth" and "Kiln People", this novel is chock full of fascinating ideas about the future of the human race. Unlike those novels he doesn't have a tight enough story to tie it all together.

A large cast keeps you moving all over his large story-scape, but these stories never seem to come together. "Famous" characters seem to be randomly thrust together after unexplained time gaps. Large events are just skipped over and talked about in retrospect...more

like · see review

Dec 13, 2012 Христо Блажев rated it 4 of 5 stars

За Живота, Вселената, извънземните и къде да се денем в една заразена от противоречия галактика
http://knigolandia.info/book-review/b...
Сядам да пиша с възкисела физиономия на лицето, след като цяла седмица ви опявах колко страхотен е този роман, колко e невероятен, завладяващ, подробен, обстоятелствен, развит до последната възможност на фабулата и прочие. Реално той е такъв, щеше да получи максималната ми оценка и щях да го препоръчвам непрестанно, както правя с най-любимите ми книги, които ми...more

like · see review

Aug 29, 2012 Paul Lunger rated it 3 of 5 stars

David Brin's "Existence" is a book that means well, but also one that kills itself due to plot interruptions that aren't necessary. The story set in at least the late 21st or 22nd century focuses on an alien artifact found by Gerald Livingston. The story of the discovery ends up online & ends up getting into the hands of various people. We also have parallel plots involving Peng Xiang Bin who finds an object associated with this discovery near China & Tor Povlov who is attempting to spre...more

like · see review

Apr 18, 2012 Liviu rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012_release_read, genre-sf, review_fbc, read_2012

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...more 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 a banal answer to "why write sf rather than literary fiction" the author starts rhapsodizing about how serious sf today means no ftl; leaving aside the "really, is our physics so advanced to claim we know it all?" cheapish answer, the irony is that instead of ftl the author posits AI's and the transference of the human personality into silicon which to me are as likely/unlikely as ftl; in some ways I can imagine an advanced humanity somehow breaking the law of physics and creating ftl within the tiniest cracks allowing it, while the sentience/self awareness barrier seems much harder to break.

In other words, the former sf space jocks missing the 1960's ride to the stars on a rocket, now will ride to the star into a small silicon wafer; again by itself that's fine with me but calling that more likely than true ftl is not serious sf, but wishful thinking 2012 in the Facebook/Twitter times rather than wishful thinking 1960's in the Apollo era...

Second also in the Afterword, the author claims:

"Existence is about the cosmos that we see. Stark, im mense beyond immensity,and unwelcoming to moist mayfl ies like us. Strangely— dauntingly—quiet. And perched in this vast emptiness is the oasis speck of Earth. More fragile than we imagined.
Yet, despite all that, might there be ways to persevere? To endure? Perhaps even to matter?"

Again, i really wish it were so, but the book is so filled with the present day leftist intelligentsia geopolitical cant combined with the Facebook/Twitter take the world vision so beloved by the nerds that the world it imagines is a mixture of the very dated 90's cyberpunk with today's social networking, where nothing else really matters or exists within a political/ideological framework that I found laughable

The book is also full of what I like to call the Thomas Friedman (per the NYt columnist) view of the world - a US white privileged man view that believes himself enlightened and understanding the rest of the world by dint of traveling there and hobnobbing with the officials and the upscale locals; I always prepare myself to cringe when non-US/western characters(as cultural location so to speak rather than ethnicity/race per se) are introduced and here it is no different; I tend to read a lot of books actually written by Japanese, Chinese or various other nationalities writers and their local characters vs the Thomas Friedman-like authors (David Brin here, Ian McDonald in Dervish House etc) show better than any explanation why one cringes when reading these last...

And incidentally it is not really a matter of race/ethnicity as the US/Western characters regardless of such are quite well drawn like the US Japanese named general or Indian named scientist of this book; it is just that somehow the "natives" must be different than the "white man land's people".

I also think that a lot of how you look at this book depends on where you think the Facebook/twitter stuff goes; if you believe it will take over the world and consume everything else, you may enjoy this book more, but personally I think the computer revolution is about done and the next big fundamental shakeups will come in bio science and maybe and just hopefully in energy producing with physics as always a wild card and as mentioned this book pretty much ignores everything else; there is a little bio stuff with the autism plague and a clinic that does stuff a bit unorthodox and of course there are satellites, space junk, SETI telescopes but nothing is really expanded or gets too much depth beyond the AI/silicon/virtual stuff, the 5 minute moment of fame on the global networks and the political stuff which I found so stupid to be really funny in many ways

Overall I will settle for a 3 star rating as in 1 star for execution (the writing is a little below what is usually the Utility English of sf, but above the usual NY Bestseller English a la Patterson or Follett since at least personally i enjoy jargon to some extent) and five stars for ambition and scope.

I plan a coherent FBC rv in June(less)

like 7 likes · see review

Jul 19, 2012 Nemo rated it 4 of 5 stars

Yet another excellent offering by one of modern-day hard science-fiction's greatest masters.However there were several things that forced me to give it a lower than maximum rating.
First of all, the pace of development - on several occasions I felt that the story was flowing too sluggishly, and while the wold-building was enjoyable I found myself yearning for more rapid plot development, at least initially.
Second - this books incorporates within itself several shorter works, and it shows, the ov...more

like 1 like · see review

title link	preview: Existence
avg rating	preview: Existence Goodreads rating: 3.67 (1264 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1326053679l/13039884.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13039884-existence?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Existence by David Brin[/url]

Existence

Friend Reviews

Lists with This Book

Community Reviews

new topic
Discuss This Book

combine
Other Editions (7)

Videos About This Book

Genres

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About David Brin

Books by David Brin

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website

Trivia About Existence

Quotes from Existence