Most of literature and storytelling boils down to one basic issue, how to balance our hopes and our fears. Within a novel we adopt the characters’ yearnings—briefly—as our own, trying them on for size. And when those dreams, those ambitions, are threatened? That drives both empathy and a gripping plot-line. The hopes can be as small-scale as getting invited to a dance and the threat might just be a teen rival…
…or the issues at stake may ramp up to include absolutely everything we value. Our families, nations, civilization, and continuing survival. Our chance to continue existing as a species. Perhaps even the flourishing of life itself in our galaxy?
Is that topic too both broad and heavy for a summer novel? Maybe so! And yet, I found the experience of writing Existence both fun and—at times—even humorous. As they say, nothing quite focuses the mind better than the approaching possibility of the end of the world. While characters hurry about discovering secrets and peeling back layers, with some of my trademark action, there are many breaks between the chapters that offer readers brief, detailed glimpses of the world in 2050.
Everything is bigger in this world — there are sixty-two U.S. States, thirty-one amendments, 10 estates (The first estate is the super-rich, the tenth is the ais) and thirteen internets. And yet, to the people in Brin's world, the future still hasn't arrived: There's still political infighting and poverty; there are smart computer programs they call A.I.s, but they aren't really sentient; robots can almost mimic people, but not quite; space travel is still limited, goods are still made in factories and shipped, and people still die.
"Existence is an attention-grabbing book, before you even open the cover. It is a thick book with a stark black and white scene printed on a lenticular panel," writes Rebecca Muir, continuing, "All these different threads come together to weave a complex picture of a society on the cusp of either greatness or destruction. The different threads provide a vehicle for introducing and exploring themes in a more direct way than simple narrative would provide."
Existence is the first novel by Brin in ten years (in 2002 he published the also wonderful Kiln People). It was one of my highly anticipated books of 2012 and it has been worth the wait. In Existence you will find many of the most important themes in the science fiction of the last thirty years: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, the singularity, global warming, and, above all, the Fermi Paradox. Oh, and intelligent dolphins, of course.
Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with EXISTENCE. Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. ...A powerful new book trailer with artwork by Patrick Farley
The jacket description is as close as one might hope to come to a succinct description of the story, and yet the jacket itself still fails to accomplish more than to touch upon a few points among dozens of others comprising the wide-ranging scope of this dizzyingly complex novel. A wealth of future history, countless, fully-developed characters, and a span of decades that only hint at eons to come all combine within the boundaries of this single volume. In this subgenre-bending work of hard social science fiction Brin delivers far more than a story, crafting for the reader an expert analysis of not only our present situation as a people, but the possible futures of civilization itself.
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 maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”
Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.
In a near future (the 2050’s or thereabouts) 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.
In a recent email interview, Brin explained how the idea for the novel came to him, noting: ”In addition to being a fiction author, I am also an astronomer and one of my areas of research is SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). So, of course, all this overlaps with science fiction. You might say that I have been exploring the concept of ‘the alien’ all my life. Along the way, I became involved in the arguments over the so-called Great Silence — the question of why we see no signs of other civilizations out there.
Brin’s thoughtful, multilayered story explores a first contact scenario where every twist reveals greater peril. His longtime fans will especially appreciate that this story could be read as a prequel to 1983’s Startide Rising, while those not familiar with his work will find it an impressive introduction to one of SF’s major talents.
TEDxDelMar - David Brin talking about The Big Picture: The Question of Existence. TEDx Del Mar was held on June 2nd, 2010 in Del Mar, California. Our topic f...
Your book is set in 2050. Tell me something hopeful about that time: Citizen power. One of the major themes I spoke about in The Postman and in Earth… and in my nonfiction tome, The Transparent Society. Often missed from discussion of events like 9/11 was how crucial is was that average people behaved so well, that day. Not panicking even slightly and performing countless ad hoc tasks admirably. Here that theme reaches its culmination. In fact, you can try a free sample short story – “The Smartest Mob” – that stands just fine by itself, illustrating where I think individual and self-organizing acting will go, what it might achieve by 2050, as a lone reporter calls for help across the hyper-smart WorldMesh.
In all of human history, only a few cultures ever managed to guide themselves across such a transition after making contact with superior outsiders, without first passing through long generations of intimidation and victimhood. Or tearing themselves apart . . .
The future is trickiest to deal with at the middle range. If your story is set within a decade or two, you just take the present-day world and warp it in some way, say by adding a disruptive technology. Or imagining some crisis or collapse. Set it more than a century from now? Then almost anything goes.
But the 40- or 50-year projection, that's special. Some of your characters were alive in 2012! Maybe they even read this interview in io9. Say you could time-snatch your younger self from 1962 and show him or her today's world, what would be the reaction? Half the time she'd say "Wow! We never thought of that." But the other half, he'd sneer "You mean it's 2012 and you're still doing that?"
"Cameras stare across a forbidden desert, monitoring disputed territory in a conflict that is so bitter the opponents cannot even agree what to name it. One side calls the struggle a war, with countless innocent lives in jeopardy. The other side claims there are no victims. And so, suspicious cameras peer and pan, alert for encroachment. Vigilant camouflaged monitors scan from atop hills or under innocuous piles of stones. They hang beneath highway culverts, probing constantly for a hated enemy. For some time -- months, at least -- these guardians have succeeded in staving off incursions across the sandy desolation. That is, until technology changes yet again, shifting the advantage briefly from defense to offense. When the enemy struck this time, their first move was to take out those guardian eyes."
This is the dilemma at the very centre of both PROMETHEUS and EXISTENCE: would making contact with an alien life form be a good idea? Would these (presumably more intelligent) beings have an inherent desire to help humanity, to set us straight, sort out our squabbling, or offer us a shiny new planet when we’ve trashed our own beyond repair? Or would they in fact just try to eat our faces, use us as lovely host organisms and generally be bad news for the continuing future of mankind?
This generation will decide so many things about human destiny. Will we charge recklessly into lethal mistakes? Or the opposite danger: going nostalgic, cowering away from hard choices, and declining into stagnation? Or might we – instead – blend the intrepid brilliance of adolescence with mature caution, find the traps and quicksand pits and land mines, picking out a narrow path till our much-smarter grandchildren are ready to take over?
You need more than text books and manuals on your desks. How about some near-future SF? Simon Bisson writes, "As technologists we need to be more than a technocratic elite, focused only on our machines and code. We may be working on what Donald Fagen's song IGY called "A just machine to make big decisions, programmed by fellows with compassion and vision", but we often miss both the compassion and the vision. It is futurist novels like these that help us understand the possible impact of our technologies."
Hugo and Nebula award winner Brin (Startide Rising; The Postman) returns to grand-scale sf with a tale that challenges the definition of humanity, the purpose of life, and the mystery of existence. Featuring memorable characters and masterly storytelling, Brin’s latest novel provides food for thought and entertainment. Fans of Vernor Vinge and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as Brin’s own sizable fan base, will enjoy this multidimensional story.
David Brin is a scientist, speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. At least a dozen have been translated into more than twenty languages. His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web*. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman.
Orbit U.K announces that the first edition of David Brin's Existence, released on 21st June 2012, will feature a cover with a unique 3D “lenticular” effect. The cover gives an impression of floating in space miles above Earth, and its distinctive nature means this book is likely to fast become a collectors’ item. There will be just one print run of this edition – and it will only be available until stocks last.
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