Existence

Dunno why this wasn't called out in more reviews, but hello -- this is an Uplift Saga prequel! At least in very small part it is. Among many other themes the book includes a look at the earliest chimp companions to human workers, and the beginnings of the dolphin uplift, as well as how humanity came to decide that it's common beliefs and upbringing that make an entity human, rather than DNA.

Many reviewers also called this book an unstructured mess, and I don't agree with that either; it has several separate characters whose stories run in parallel and may only intersect late in the book, but it consistently switches between these characters and I didn't find it too hard to follow. The main ones include
- Gerald Livingstone, an astronaut and scavenger of space junk who finds a mysterious glowing object in high orbit which leads the Earth to contact with multiple alien races;
- Tor Povlov, a reporter newly promoted from social media origins, who leverages crowd wisdom;
- Peng Xiang Bin and his wife, who are "shoresteaders" scavenging a life from the ruins of former shoreline mansions in China, and who discover a mysterious stone;
- Hamish Brookeman, a famous author of books and blockbuster movies, who heavily influences a skeptic movement opposing the aliens;
- Hacker Sander, the rich and idle son of a wealthy family whose accident leads him to find a new life work, and his mother, trying to negotiate a path between toeing the line between the Old Money families and science.

Brin alternates between characters and across a fairly wide timespan to attempt to illustrate ways in which humanity might handle problems such as the growing number of autistic children being born, contact with alien representatives, the place of artificial intelligences within human society, how social media networks could leverage crowdsourcing as a source of greater knowledge and efficiency than any one person alone could manage, and the development of news media as a whole.

There are so many big ideas in this book that it's a bit crowded, and I agree with many reviewers who said that Brin is trying to tackle too much on too big a scale. This could have made several separate books each dealing with fewer issues; combining everything into one is a bit of a mess and leads to several interesting characters and ideas being somewhat abandoned without full exploration. Still, the ideas are all good, and interesting, and if you have the patience to untangle them from each other they're very thought provoking. I'm torn between 3 stars for trying to stuff as many ideas as possible into too ambitious a single book, and 4 stars for the sheer number of interesting ideas that Brin covers. I wouldn't recommend this as the first book by Brin you pick up though; go back to the original Uplift trilogy for that.

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 Brin uses to launch into examinations of space exploration, politics, information technology, genetics, and just about every other sort of scientific related issue that you can imagine. Both the amount and scope of the ideas examined in this novel were truly amazing. Almost every page was stuffed with more ideas than fit into an average SF novel.

Brin tackles head-on the current malaise and sense of stumbling into a dystopian future. In fact, this sense of pessimism and failure of ambition are called out to task as our ultimate dangers. His belief is that only a sense of optimism and continued forward progress can solve our current (and future) problems. We must find our strength in diversity and continue forward rather than meekly await some dismal future.