[PDF] Existence | by ↠ David Brin - Existence, Existence Bestselling award winning futurist David Brin returns to globe spanning high concept SF with Existence Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector For a hundred years people have been abandon
- Title: Existence
- Author: David Brin
- ISBN: -
- Page: 158
- Format: Kindle Edition
[PDF] Existence | by ↠ David Brin, Existence, David Brin, Existence Bestselling award winning futurist David Brin returns to globe spanning high concept SF with Existence Gerald Livingston 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 mapsBestselling award [PDF] Existence | by ↠ David Brin - Existence, Existence Bestselling award winning futurist David Brin returns to globe spanning high concept SF with Existence Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector For a hundred years people have been abandon
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[PDF] Existence | by ↠ David Brin
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David Brin
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 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 h [...]
While 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 recommended [...]
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 norm [...]
Originally published on my blog mybiochemicalsky.wordpress 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 levels Existence has inhe [...]
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 , 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 ba [...]
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 the final pa [...]
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 , that other intelligent species [...]
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 materi [...]
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 consider [...]
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 characters and [...]
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 and PO [...]
I love David Brin s books Normally I really do I need to go back and review 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 alien probe wh [...]
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 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 Insightful, [...]
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 hand, h [...]
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 What [...]
Bravo David Brin has written a masterfully polished work that contemplates deep ideas about a vast universe that manages to be a compelling page turner of a read The nested, parallel story lines and fragments of TED like texts makes for a dense and richly populated world One that seems to constantly teeter from the brink of falling into any number of traps that could doom humanity A world that is self aware enough to pull back from each catastrophe before it completely unfolds Few authors have e [...]
this giant tome turns out to be at least half a dozen old stories the author wrote a decade or 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 herringske another reviewer here wrote, it was as if brin was determined to write 500 pag [...]
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 f [...]
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 of him , an author, a super intelligent news reporter later beco [...]
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 ultimate [...]
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 , but Exist [...]
Existence, by David Brin, has gotten many very positive reviews One reviewer from SFF World stated, Existence is my top SF novel of 2012 and I recommend it without hesitation Well, I strongly disagree Existence is a first contact science fiction book in which Brin presents some interesting and unique concepts that could have been woven into a very informative and interesting story Unfortunately, Brin failed to accomplish that because the strangely disjointed narrative throughout the book did not [...]
Existence was a tough read The opening chapters are kind of slow going and it didn t help that I didn t much care for any of the characters at first So why five stars Partly because it got better, things started to come together eventually, and the characters grow on you at least a bit Partly because Brin s writing style is solid as always But mostly because this is a mind blowing epic of a book Neo Feudalism, the Fermi Paradox, the problems with AI, transhumanism, and all the ways the world mig [...]
This book seemed like disconnected, vaguely related collections of stories that were pieced out in short snippets Each chapter focussed on one storyline, but was short and cut abruptly to the next one.I found it hard to figure out and keep track of all the storylines Mostly because I only liked a few of them, mostly the ones that had some action happening like Peng Xiang Bin s story, or Tor s zepplin adventure The majority of the time it seemed that nothing much was happening.Another feature I f [...]
The opening scene of Existence, David Brin s long awaited return to novel length science fiction, is a great set piece that s meaningful in a number of ways astronaut Gerald Livingstone is working on the border of Earth and deep space, literally between heaven and earth and helped by a monkey, no less The symbolism couldn t be clearer if he waved a flag depicting the Sistine Chapel s God s hand reaching down from Heaven scene.What Gerald actually does in orbit seems, at first, much less upliftin [...]
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 1.4I 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 in eboo [...]
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.
_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 [...]
I believe this is the sort of novel that people might be thinking of when they suggest science fiction is ideas heavy but character and or plot light I d never really understood that accusation of modern SF until now I would have given it 3.5 if I could It took me than a fortnight to finish reading this For fewer than 550 pages, that s well, for me that s positively an age I did consider giving up on it, several times in fact But the ideas kept me coming back and made me determined to see it th [...]
Only about a third in so far, and will update this as I proceed updated below , but jeez Great, interesting ideas, but the story would have benefitted from Brin s having decided to incorporate his essays into the action No reason why the characters and storyline couldn t convey the ideas instead of lamely backing out of the novel to expound in between chapters Tolstoy he s not Also, the chapters are very short and jump from POV to POV There are so many characters and we often leave something som [...]