Existence

By: David Brin

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins, Robin Miles, L. J. Ganser

Length: 32 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Best-selling, 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.

©2012 David Brin (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Good Story

Good story themes. Included some concepts from prior stories. Fans should appreciate that. Female narration was a bit soft, volume wise.

Ok overall with good chunks

A bit of a fragmented story. Story arcs start but never resolve. Characters are the focus for a long period and then not mentioned again. I'm a Brin fan, but this really wasn't his best work. Worth a read/listen but likely won't blow you away.

A Good Listen

I always feel like giving three stars potentially short shrifts a book, but the rating should be seen for what it is: good, but not great. I know I’m guilty of sometimes dismissing too quickly books with too many three star reviews, and also sometimes finding hidden gems among them. The thing is, Existence really could go either way for you. It’s well written and full of interesting ideas, exciting at times and large in scope. But I also found it frustrating, occasionally meandering and unnecessary. Expect to invest hours in a character’s story only to have them never to appear again. Some of the chapter “interludes” we’re completely inexplicable to me. Other concerns include the shockingly cynical premise motivating the stones, and the total lack of ethical implications in the final hour of the book. On the latter point it’s honestly a little horrifying that the (lack of) ethics in such decisions aren’t even mentioned.
In conclusion, I don’t feel as though my time was wasted. I enjoyed Existence overall but this book is a big investment, and in the end I think it misses its lofty goals.

A huge book bursting with ideas

This appears to be Brin's last novel. It is a huge polemic with bits of story telling. His more recent works are not novels and his most recent (2019) is even called "Polemical Judo" This is a book that is most appropriate for a college course. Much like "Classics" such as Gulliver's Travels or "Moby Dick". I had one question of detail about the 10 estates, Googled it. There were answers on Quora but... Meanwhile Brin himself, answered the question n 2017, with a partial answer, and a line at the end that he couldn't recall some. Significant (to me) It was not even close to to the "top answer" meaning most popular, not the most correct. The book also explains why (in the epilogue / acknowledgements) why I have "odd" ideas, A lifetime of reading similar books. Many writers, write such books in their youth (and most are never published). But a livetime teaching, and getting to a certain age, makes Brin think he can succeed. So.. a very odd book, meant to be read in small bites. Will this last to be a "Classic"? I certainly have no way of knowing, especially in this day and age when "classic" just means "old", million (billions?) of books being produced every year, "common sense" is now determined by the loudest voice, with the "simplest" explanation (but not the correct one). It is widely reported that 90% of the scientists that have ever lived. Are still alive. I wonder if it is a similar percentage for book writers. Do I recommend the book? YES. But... Sturgeon's Law".

One of my Faves. Should be required reading for any politician.

This is one of my faves. Up there with UKL, Butler, Stephenson, and Stapledon.

Such a wide ranging, far thinking story; not possible to summarize. Just trust the author and enjoy.

Looking forward to reading more of Brin’s work.

Big ideas, good science fiction, frustrating style

The story starts out slow and I was tempted to stop listening several time in the first few chapters. I recommend you keep going, a lot of interesting things will eventually happen. Unfortunately a lot of very uninteresting things also happen. It is almost like Brin had a goal of writing over 500 pages and was not going to let the fact that he only had 300 pages of material stop him.

On the plus side, the book has lots of great science fiction material, ancient aliens, machine intelligence's, high tech gadgets, and exploration of the solar system. It even has some very good characters (Human and alien). I also found his plan for how other intelligent races would contact and interact with whatever life exists in the our galaxy to be novel and well reasoned. It explains very nicely why we don't see any evidence of life when look out into the Milky Way.

Of course there are also some problems, for some reason Brin is not able to simply tell what should have been a great story. Instead he is constantly interrupting the story with whole chapters that have no relevance to the story or even any real purpose. To make it worse when reading one of the chapters that does tell the story he will invariable end the chapter as if it was the last show of the season for an action adventure series on TV. Ever one of these chapters will end with the narrator saying something like "and then she saw something that will forever change the way we think of the universe" or "then something unimaginable came around the corner" . The chapter then ends and we get 40 pages about something completely different (different characters, different plot line). By the time Brin gets back to the main plot I have almost forgot where the story left off. I can forgive an author for leaving the reader hanging once or twice, it helps to build suspense. But by the tenth or fifteenth time Brin does this is just annoying. It happens so often and with such ham-fisted prose, it becomes laughable which totally breaks the mood of the story.

Brin also goes to extraordinary ends to include elements of his Uplift books in the story. Even though they add nothing and actually impede the story. It is almost as if he had a bet with his publisher that he could include 5 chapters about Uplift without making it seem like an unrelated story. I assume he lost the bet.

Even with all the problems I am still going to recommend the book, just because I liked the big ideas the book presents.

This is an optimistic sci-fi story that inspires

The story is about how people learn from the mistakes from the generations before, and how they go about making their own.

Every time there was a huge leap forward in the society, you could feel the hope and wonder the population was emanating... that moment of "what if". Then that wonderful hope was deflated by the nay-sayers, who didn't want society to change, to keep everyone in the status quo for their own selfish desires.

I struggled with my this, my final paragraph, for a little while. Everything I wrote was laden with spoilers, imagined or implied. So I will say, I do hope our world can face the future with the dignity and ingenuity that was portrayed on our behalf.

p.s. this story has aliens, cyborgs, uplifted dolphins, asteroid mining, habitations in space, caste based societies, underwater treasure hunting, and dirigibles.

Great start, but fizzled out by the end

I was excited when I started listening to the book. It was a fun story. Some reviewers have complained about the jumping around, but I thought that it was easy to follow. Alas, the individual stories never completely come together. In part, the plot is far too ambitious. In the last third of the book, a large number of new unnecessary concepts (humanoid AIs, multiple virtual copies of humans, etc.) start being hurtled at the reader but are never fully explored. On the other hand, many of the characters in the first part of the book are more or less totally abandoned. An entire plot line (Hacker Sander) dissolves into nothing just as it gets interesting. We see a lot of "character development" that never really goes anywhere at all. It's really a shame. With some tightening up, this could have been fantastic!

The narration was just okay - many of the characters had identical voices and strange accents.

Great overall, but can be frustrating at times.

The story overall is great, and I love the author's ideas. However there were a times I felt like the story was trying too hard to cover too much territory. Often there were tangents that had no role in moving the plot forward. Still, for the science fiction fan this is a good read.

I tried to like it

And I did. For awhile. Then the heavy-handed moralizing would again rear its unpleasant head. The overall plot should have been an interesting one. I certainly loved the Uplift series.
I managed to finish it. That’s the best I can say.