Existence

A grand book full of novel ideas. ( )

A very good bit of "universe building", and some glorious extrapolation the internet and human nature in the face of the lightspeed limit. Doesn't have the forced anti-privacy elements some of Brin's earlier works have - they're just woven in as convincing inevitabilities of taking today's social-connected-everything forward a few steps. I'll leave it at that - don't want to spoil any of the intertwined setups for entertaining reveals (the book has a number of startling reveals that on further thought, "huh, I really *should* have seen that coming...") which I very much enjoyed. The story, and the universe, were both "well constructed". ( )

I waffled between three and four stars for Existence, but I'm going to give it the four even though I think it's more in the 3.5 range.

The cons first: the book is sprinkled with what read to me as indulgent author-insertions in the form of monologues and infodumps. As a regular reader of Brin's blog, which is quite good and thought-provoking, I found that not only his ideas but his blog-voice were creeping in far too often. This would be fine if it were limited to the pseudonymous narrations book-ending each chapter, but I found Brin often speaking in the inner thoughts of his characters as well.

I didn't like heavy-handed authorial intrusion when Dan Simmons did it in Flashback and I don't care for it here. It isn't the views espoused per se, as much as it is being jerked out of the story with the occasional eye-roll because you're suddenly hearing the author rather than his creation.

That out of the way, I thought the story itself was imaginative, thoughtful, and at least some (perhaps of the majority) of the characters were interesting enough for me to follow. There were a handful of sub-plots that felt out of place and never really went anywhere, but the story as a whole was creative and interesting enough for me to follow. There's a jarring transition around the last third to quarter of the book, after which some characters vanish along with their sub-plots, but being that this is ambitious SF I'm used to that and consider it part of the ride. The conceit of this book is...well, I'll say unique and leave it at that (on the most positive possible note).

Brin is, to me, always worth a read and Existence is no exception if you're into speculative fiction with a more optimistic slant. ( )

Existence is a door stopper of a book but big is not always best. The tragedy is that if this work had been slimmed down drastically and published as short fiction it would attain classic status for its inventive riffing on the Fermi Paradox: if there is life out there, why have we not found it yet? Yet as a bloated novel, which is padded out by way too much authorial riffing around the core theme, and some very wooden story vignettes which add very little to the overall concept, it becomes a bore. Another option would be to make a film of it, but as a novel it is a bloated, plodding dud. ( )

This book is chock full of SF ideas and interesting musings. However it is a bit long at 650 pages. ( )