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41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Realistic and thought-provoking, August 21, 2000
This review is from: Earth (Mass Market Paperback)
Brin's 'Earth' takes place in the year 2038, and the portrait painted of our society 40-some years from now is so totally plausible that it's a little disturbing. By 2038, Earth's population has grown to over 10 billion, natural resources are even more depleted than they are today, and many people think that the population is on the verge of a massive crash. Brin's depiction of the way that various sectors of society deal with this concept is complex and fascinating. Although many of the scientific aspects of the book were somewhat confusing to me, I was still able to follow the plot. I have studied quite a bit of ecology, have also had a few courses in geophysics, and I was pleased that everything Brin has included in his story is consistent with today's scientific beliefs. The structure of the novel is interesting as well; little tidbits from the general populace and their responses to the events detailed in the chapters are interspersed throughout the book. Furthermore, the character development is excellent; many "hard" science fiction novels are more about the technology and the situations than about the characters themselves, but Brin has made his characters and their motivations very real and well-developed. Even the less important characters like Logan Eng were as detailed as the central protagonists. There was only one thing that I did not like about this book, and that is the 'deus ex machina' (sp?) of the ending. I won't say any more because I don't want any spoilers. 'Earth' raises a lot of issues about the environment, the supposed superiority of humankind, the interconnectedness of all living things, the individual's right to privacy, and much more. Lots of food for thought and a fantastic book for discussion (I read this for a book discussion group, and I can't wait to hear what everyone else has to say about it). I haven't read anything else by David Brin, but after reading 'Earth', I definitely want to.
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my all-time favorites, September 5, 2000
This review is from: Earth (Mass Market Paperback)
For a few years I was reading Earth once a year, just like I do with Lord of the Rings. Although it's not quite on the same level, it's a wonderful sci-fi. Brin projects a fairly realistic future with real people, real problems, and the truly cool premise of dealing with a microscopic black hole orbiting the planet's core. The Gaianism (the dominant religion of this environmentally threatened future) was a tad heavy-handed at times, but still didn't get too much into the way to like it. Interspersed with the action were excerpts from the global Net, which augmented the story in ways that reminded me of what Pohl did with Gateway. This sort of transition helped a lot to make the epic size of the book feel much more manageable. Brin predicted a few things that, like Jules Verne long before him, have since come true or have begun to come true. Central to the book is the Net, which was no doubt based on the Internet which was only a sapling when the book was written; since then the Web has exploded and is operating much like Brin foresaw it would. He even predicted the appearance of spam and the massive, daunting problems of sifting for information online. If all this doesn't sound interesting enough, well, there's more to say for the story. Much of the plot revolves around a small group of people--in a society heavily biased against secrecy--trying both to conceal and to eliminate the threat of a black hole within the earth. The things they discover along this road make some very interesting sci-fi; it's almost hard sci-fi at times. Meanwhile the world is full of other people somehow connected to all this, or to each other. Some know what's going on or at least that there's a conspiracy, and want to know more or to direct the course of events to their own ends. A new technology that emerges--perhaps not even too far-fetched in its concept (owing to Brin's background as a physicist)--becomes the focal point of a power struggle. Most of this we see through the eyes of an interesting assortment of rather identifiable characters. Earth is overall a worthy story that's just as good (if not better) the second and third time around. The "chapters" are even reasonably short for the most part, allowing reading on the go and keeping things from getting tedious.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The challenges of near-future speculative fiction, August 4, 2006
This review is from: Earth (Mass Market Paperback)
I read David Brin's Earth not long after it first came out, perhaps 1991 or 1992; and for whatever reason, although I enjoy Brin in general and enjoyed this book when I read it, I never got back to it. Recently I've been reading a lot of Dr. Brin's nonfiction (his essays and blog and I plan to get hold of "Transparent Society" this summer) and in the course of that reading, I came across references to a hobby of Brin fans: picking apart Earth (set in 2038) and following tech and social trends and developments in the news, to play a sort of "I Spy" with correct predictions. This intrigued me, and I decided to re-read the book. Because, after all, writing near-future stories is very hard; life tends to go off in unexpected directions and quickly date a work.
Heinlein's "For Us, The Living," which I read about a month ago, is a brilliant piece of near-future speculative fiction - and only a tiny handful of his predictions hit target. That's pretty typical. What's positively freakish about Earth is how many predictions are dead-on, having - in fifteen of the fifty years between the writing and the projected future - either come to pass or come far enough along a developmental road that their occurence in the next thirty-five years is very likely. The powerfully evoked sense of juxtaposed familiarity and alienness is exactly the feeling that I've heard elderly friends and acquaintances talk about when they describe the last fifty years - wait, how did we get here, and why didn't I notice?
Earth is a dense book, a tightly woven complexity of about eight different story lines that all turn out to be intextricably related. It's a cast of millions; there's inevitably some shallow characterization there, but the dozen or so major characters have richly distinct and diverse voices. None of them (except, perhaps, the teenage genius, Claire) is entirely likeable, but all of them are tremendously credible; ultimately, I found myself really caring about each of them. But over and above the characterization in the microscale of the individual, there's a place where character and setting intermingle, bleed through, where communities and societies and the Earth itself become characters, take on a dynamic life and movement and responsiveness. It's just the sheer incredible richness and detail and texture, both of the individuals and of the world in which they move, that makes this book such a sensuous delight. There comes a point when I find the commodities price lists and obscure blog threads and other bits of electonic flotsam and jetsam injected into the text as compelling as the interactions and crises of the characters.
The actual plot - a physics experiment gone horribly wrong, and a close-knit team trying to make it right, in secret, in a world where secrecy has become a war crime - is just technothriller enough to keep the pace clipping along, just old-school hard sci-fi enough to make the reader work at it (think Greg Bear's Eon and sequels). All in all, a thoroughly fun read that is also emotionally and intellectually engaging and - still, after all these years - astonishingly relevant.
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