Existence

By: David Brin

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

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.

Interesting Concept

The concept and ideas in this story are interesting and a little bit different. You have to wade through a bit of detail but overall its a good story. Certainly worth a credit.

A worthy story from one of the best SF authors

This is a bit of a different book for Brin. He's been one of the better writers of hard SF over the years, particularly the Uplift series which I thought was original and a good read (at least for the first couple books).

This book stylistically is much different in a couple respects, first he builds on current societal trends including social media, always-on connectivity and extrapolates a realistic future several decades into the future. However at its heart, it's a story of first contact with an alien race. He adds a bit of a prequel to the Uplift trilogy, although that's more of a sidelight to this book than a main plot.

Along the way, he has a couple of engaging subplots at a very human level, some are key to the plot some are (in my opinion) a way to show that sometimes people who really move the needle in big events simply disappear and are anonymous. Some people may dislike this style of storytelling, personally I thought it worked.

The story is set up for sequel, and I would look forward to the author connecting this story with the Uplift Trilogy.

Performances by the three readers are outstanding with each responsible for seven characters what makes you feel as if there's a much larger cast.

Long and a little birding

What happened to the dolphins did I sleep through it . I remover long ago reading the uplift wars .... and enjoying it . But this didn’t do it for me

Started disjointed but all tied together.

Need to not give up with the disjointed beginning. It's needed for the whole story to fall into place. Was worth it.

And answer for "Where are the aliens"

What did you love best about Existence?

That Dr Brin took his Futurist ideas to a story

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

A battle on a blimp

Any additional comments?

Dr Brin is a physicist and a futurist. He not only tries to figure out where current tech is going, he tries to figure out its impact on society. In this book, he takes all that to extreme levels and tells a story. It contains one answer to the question, "Where are the aliens" With over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, there should be some around. He also includes a lot of what is happening now, such as global warming. I quite enjoyed the story he built around this.