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.

slow to get started

this book was kind of slow to get started but once it was started it turned out to be a fairly good read. there was characters in the book that a lot of time was spent on that didn't seem to have a lot to do with it.

Enjoyable book with perhaps too many side stories

Interesting plot line. Excellent characters and descriptive prose. Exceptionally well-narrated. My only criticism is that it's a bit too long. The author is a little indulgent when it comes to some of the side stories. The side-story centering on the character named "Hacker", for example, could be dropped without losing anything from the main story.

thoughtful but the ending failed

What did you like best about Existence? What did you like least?

talk about a real interesting take on alien contact!

Any additional comments?

I LOVED this book...until the end. I've found this with Brin's other work though as well. He just doesn't seem to know how he wants to end his stories. maybe this is something he actually wants to do...drives me crazy.

I loved the premise and the characters. The ideas put forth really make you think even past when you turn off the audio book. You start to wonder if maybe..just maybe this might actually be what is going on. Or that it could happen.

inventive contact scenario.

Worst opening of any book ever but the rest of it was good. There's room for a sequel to tie up loose ends and continue the story. I was surprised to find several chapters lifted almost verbatim from one of David Brin's short stories. That part doesn't really fit as there isn't hardly a precedent for it but I would like to read more about those characters as well.

No what i was expecting but good

I'm not sure what i was expecting from this book but what i got was an awesome story that im still trying to wrap my brain around.

Fermi paradox fun

Very interesting take on the Fermi paradox and first contact. Plenty of drama and science woven together to make a satisfying and fun book. Great voices to match the good characters.

thought provoking

it starts off slow and in a strange way introducing characters that seemingly have nothing in common. it then becomes a masterpiece combining science fiction and well thought out questions

Good-- until the 5-hour epilogue

I enjoyed this, overall, but it takes some investment. It starts with a long series of seemimgly unrelated happenings that take a while to start coming together, but it explores some truly fascinating ideas in the process. It eventually comes to a resolution-- and then goes on for five more hours. It's kind of a five-hour meandering epilogue, with a completely random closing scene. Weird-- but still worthwhile

Excellent

I wasn’t sure how he would bring so many stories together, but he did in the end.

Will its universe envelop you?

Any additional comments?

I have noticed that reviewers are very divided on this book. I am one of those that found it amazingly entertaining. But might it be for you?

I had not read anything by Brin before, but will now. "Existence" tells me he is one of the authors that puts more emphasis on ideas rather than characters, sometimes even creating characters only to illustrate a philosophical notion.

To me then, he is an expert in making the philosophy I love come to life. He shows how abstract thinking might matter and he makes thinking the central activity around which the novel revolves. I would place him in the tradition of Asimov's Foundation series, although the philosophy Brin represents, is less invested in modernist and chauvinist notions of man's control over nature and the future. Brin's characters cannot control society or plan the future, but they try to matter in a universe driven by chance and that is partial to diversity.

So, if you are a lover of philosophy and other fields of ideas, you will love this book. On the other hand, if you find philosophical thinking boring, you will probably find the novel boring. Thirdly, if you are a person that have difficulty following abstract lines of reasoning, it is possible you will find the book difficult to follow and its plot full of lacunae. Many reviewers have this third kind of comments on the book, which actually made me a bit hesitant before I bought it. Although my comprehension of English is quite good, I do have difficulties following novels where timelines and plots are experimentally rearranged for some lyrical purpose. To my relief, I found "Existence" is not one of those novels. My conjecture is therefore that Brin's book is difficult to follow if you have difficulties following the ideas that are the actual core of the book. The plot does make some jumps in time here and there, and those can be irritating if you are invested in a certain character or series of events. The jumps are much more tolerable if you follow the ideas Brin develops.

There are however two slight shortcomings. Brin overuses the cliff-hanger trope. When every chapter ends with something akin to "He turned around and could not believe his eyes", it does become a nuisance. Secondly, although Brin mostly explores ideas, he sometimes starts to advocate them and does it too openly. The whole point of the plot, I would argue, is that humankind have choices and needs to embrace diversity. As that is a viewpoint I endorse, I am always hesitant when sci-fi authors advocate a certain way of doing things, rather than explore hypothetical scenarios. Brin should have excluded his postscript in particular, where he openly "explains" the thinking behind the novel and comes with some frustrating admonishments for humanity. I believe the novel is much more effective when that kind of advocacy is left out. With those two shortcomings, this otherwise brilliant novel only gets four "story stars" from me.