Existence

Paperback

English language

Published Aug. 6, 2012 by Orbit.

ISBN:
978-0-356-50173-4
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3 stars (21 reviews)

Bestselling, award-winning futurist David Brin returns to globe-spanning, high concept SF with Existence.

Gerald Livingstone 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.

3 editions

Review of 'Existence' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

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 …

Review of 'Existence' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

One star might be harsh, but I have to do it because I stopped reading this halfway through, felt relieved to be done with it and then somehow went back to it, and wish I'd not ended up finishing it. The infuriating thing is that any individual chunk of this is likely not bad, and some of them are pretty good, but the whole is just not there. (And the editing .. well, it's a modern 700 page novel, with dangling plot threads, so no, there was no editing.)

If it had a "warning: fixup novel" in the front matter, I'd give it 2 stars. But it's a stealth fixup, not done well. Be warned.

Review of 'Existence' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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 …

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