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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Epic ideas, so-so-execution

I can only give David Brin's latest a 3.5 - It models itself on John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar as a near future exploration of vital topics but the very long mixed together narratives with no character as a central focus for long ended up often putting me to sleep.

Love the ideas, the near-future forecasts, the characters individually, but it doesn't quite become the epic it should be. Most of the threads are amazing, the ideas are amazing, the whole not so much. Disentangling this book might have helped, I would like to hear "Pandora's Cornucopia" and "Aliens, Choose Why You are Silent" and some of the characters stories all in one block. The last third of the book, once people go out into the belt, could also be a great stand alone.

If you like your SF on the intellectual and hard side and are curious about Fermi's Paradox you should really get this book. Not for casual readers or listeners.

Tediously interersting

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

It presented some interesting ideas; it was a slow listen.

Would you recommend Existence to your friends? Why or why not?

Not unless they've been bad...Christmas season and all that.

What three words best describe the narrators’s voice?

Several narrators read

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Maybe, it had some interesting concepts.

Any additional comments?

Took much longer to get through than planned...I now know how members of Lyle Lovett's song "Church" felt while waiting for the sermon to end.

Interesting but

The story gets lost in the minutiae! This book desperately needs an abridged version.
The performance isn't too bad given the complexity of the story line.

Needs a good edit

You need to be ready for a listening marathon! I found it contained some interesting concepts and musings that left me thinking, but the thoughtful gems were hidden in a vast story with many characters. Some of the American voices were very similar in character and I found it hard to differentiate between them, So I had to re-listen to key bits. There were enough impediments to make listening to the end drudgery. I breathe a sigh of relief at the end. That’s a bit sad.

Too Verbose!

I have enjoyed most of the books I've read by David Brin, which are admittably few. This is by far the worst of my sampling. The others I've read are the Uplift Wars and the Practice Effect. All of those I consider credit-worthy... this book not so much.

Mr. Brin is overly verbose in all his novels, problem here is I'm not exactly sure where we are or what the point is to Exetinction. Unlike The Uplift Wars, this book skates around the issue and doesn't really go anyplace. After reading The Uplift Wars, which was a well conceived world and discusses an extremely interesting debate of how races become first class citizens (and the politics of holding them back) this story goes nowhere and meanders while doing it.