Earth

by David Brin

Book Overview

Here is multiple-award winning author David Brin's most important, most ambitious, and most universal novel to date--a blockbuster epic that transcends his already distinguished body of work in scope... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 055329024X
• Release Date: May 1991
• Publisher: Spectra
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.9" x 1.9" x 4.2"

Customer Reviews

The challenges of near-future speculative fiction

I read David Brin's Earth not long after it first came out, perhaps 1991 or 1992; and for whatever reason, although I enjoy Brin in general and enjoyed this book when I read it, I never got back to it. Recently I've been reading a lot of Dr. Brin's nonfiction (his essays and blog and I plan to get hold of "Transparent Society" this summer) and in the course of that reading, I came across references to a hobby of Brin fans: picking apart Earth (set in 2038) and following tech and social trends and developments in the news, to play a sort of "I Spy" with correct predictions. This intrigued me, and I decided to re-read the book. Because, after all, writing near-future stories is very hard; life tends to go off in unexpected directions and quickly date a work. Heinlein's "For Us, The Living," which I read about a month ago, is a brilliant piece of near-future speculative fiction - and only a tiny handful of his predictions hit target. That's pretty typical. What's positively freakish about Earth is how many predictions are dead-on, having - in fifteen of the fifty years between the writing and the projected future - either come to pass or come far enough along a developmental road that their occurence in the next thirty-five years is very likely. The powerfully evoked sense of juxtaposed familiarity and alienness is exactly the feeling that I've heard elderly friends and acquaintances talk about when they describe the last fifty years - wait, how did we get here, and why didn't I notice? Earth is a dense book, a tightly woven complexity of about eight different story lines that all turn out to be intextricably related. It's a cast of millions; there's inevitably some shallow characterization there, but the dozen or so major characters have richly distinct and diverse voices. None of them (except, perhaps, the teenage genius, Claire) is entirely likeable, but all of them are tremendously credible; ultimately, I found myself really caring about each of them. But over and above the characterization in the microscale of the individual, there's a place where character and setting intermingle, bleed through, where communities and societies and the Earth itself become characters, take on a dynamic life and movement and responsiveness. It's just the sheer incredible richness and detail and texture, both of the individuals and of the world in which they move, that makes this book such a sensuous delight. There comes a point when I find the commodities price lists and obscure blog threads and other bits of electonic flotsam and jetsam injected into the text as compelling as the interactions and crises of the characters. The actual plot - a physics experiment gone horribly wrong, and a close-knit team trying to make it right, in secret, in a world where secrecy has become a war crime - is just technothriller enough to keep the pace clipping along, just old-school hard sci-fi enough to make the reader work at it (think Greg Bear's Eon and sequels). All in all

Brave New Brin

Brin pays homage to Aldous Huxley in this book, which is the best near-future epic since Huxley's "Brave New World". Regardless of how you feel about environmentalism, you have to admit that Brin has extrapolated current events to logical, yet surprising continuums. A world-wide fabric of computer communication? Duh. Real time video recorders on every person? It's happening now. Arks to protect animals from ozone-depleted UV blindness? Not too much of a stretch. Energy from manufactured black holes. Okay, that may test your imagination.One thing that won't stretch your credulity though is Brin's mastry of character development. There are dozens of fully fleshed humans that are eminently believable and at the same time, unpredictable. Who is the obvious alpha male in the youth gang? Wrong. What has that annoyingly persistant reporter got planned? Wrong. Even the slightly out of pattern ending will startle you.The book really has a little bit of everything, including Brin's famous wit, understated but warming romance, and heart-stopping suspense. If you don't like this book, then you just don't like hard science fiction.

HEAVY

I know that a book has affected me when its ideas keep popping up in my conversations. Earth is one of those books, because it covers so many issues that I consider to be hot topics: privacy, the information super-highway, restrictions in scientific research, evolution of consciousness and the future of the entire human race.I read a couple of reviews here criticizing the shallow characterizations, but all of the characters seemed like real people to me. It has a great villain you'll love to hate, and loads of intelligent people having intelligent conversations.If you don't like books that jump back and forth between several sets of characters and plots, then you won't like Earth. I happen to enjoy this format, to see how the various people and situations merge in a grand finale; and believe me, this book has a heck of a grand finale!

One of my all-time favorites

For a few years I was reading Earth once a year, just like I do with Lord of the Rings. Although it's not quite on the same level, it's a wonderful sci-fi. Brin projects a fairly realistic future with real people, real problems, and the truly cool premise of dealing with a microscopic black hole orbiting the planet's core.The Gaianism (the dominant religion of this environmentally threatened future) was a tad heavy-handed at times, but still didn't get too much into the way to like it. Interspersed with the action were excerpts from the global Net, which augmented the story in ways that reminded me of what Pohl did with Gateway. This sort of transition helped a lot to make the epic size of the book feel much more manageable.Brin predicted a few things that, like Jules Verne long before him, have since come true or have begun to come true. Central to the book is the Net, which was no doubt based on the Internet which was only a sapling when the book was written; since then the Web has exploded and is operating much like Brin foresaw it would. He even predicted the appearance of spam and the massive, daunting problems of sifting for information online.If all this doesn't sound interesting enough, well, there's more to say for the story. Much of the plot revolves around a small group of people--in a society heavily biased against secrecy--trying both to conceal and to eliminate the threat of a black hole within the earth. The things they discover along this road make some very interesting sci-fi; it's almost hard sci-fi at times. Meanwhile the world is full of other people somehow connected to all this, or to each other. Some know what's going on or at least that there's a conspiracy, and want to know more or to direct the course of events to their own ends. A new technology that emerges--perhaps not even too far-fetched in its concept (owing to Brin's background as a physicist)--becomes the focal point of a power struggle. Most of this we see through the eyes of an interesting assortment of rather identifiable characters.Earth is overall a worthy story that's just as good (if not better) the second and third time around. The "chapters" are even reasonably short for the most part, allowing reading on the go and keeping things from getting tedious.

Fantastic, exteremely entertaining, and thought provoking

Brin keeps you reading, constantly introducing new plot twists and a host of richly developed characters, all projected against a fascinating backdrop of a very probable earth as it might be in 2038. Judging from the fact that Brin wrote "Earth" back in 1990, his predicitions have rung true in many places, most notably our modern day internet, in comparison with his world data net. The fates of all his characters slowly intertwine as the book reaches its final and surprising climax. Very staisfying with every chapter, and then the epilogue just brings it all home. I couldn't sleep at all the night after I finished it. Simply brilliant.