"Existence" by David Brin
Existence by David Brin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A highly stimulating, addictive, fascinating food for thought book. Loads of great ideas and quotable quotes. I usually take weeks to read even 300 page books, but I've gotten though most of this 800 page book in two days!
This book has a complex plot. It also has lots of asides and sub-plots that seem like mere social commentary or futurebuilding at first but later become relevant to the plot. But even the most seemingly pointless asides and brief mentions of things in passing turn out to be relevant to the overall story.
Also, the story is a very good, logical, complex possible answer to the Fermi Paradox.
Some of the tech lingo/slang and AI puns can get a little annoying at times, and the name of one character, Tenskwatawa, kept tripping me up because I have no idea how to pronounce it. Also, Brin drags out the suspense of certain revelations a bit too much in my opinion, but I think that's because he wants us to put the pieces together ourselves and guess the truth before it is revealed. Oh, and Professor Noozone's affected Jamaican accent is a bit off-putting, but oh well. (It is still clear than he is black, if not really Jamaican.)
THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS. DO NOT READ BEYOND IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS.
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One note: Brin covers some pretty controversial ideas and points of view in this book, but he covers many angles and lots of later things kind of mock earlier POVs. I almost gave up on this book because of the POV of one group of characters towards autistics, but I'm glad I persisted. It still contains a few old stereotypes about auties and aspies but in general the best characters have positive or neutral viewpoints of auties. Even the most controversial character group, the group that wanted to change auties to be more social, wanted to find a way to do it while keeping the positive attributes of autism, and even give those positive attributes of autism to allistics.
I also like the handling of the queerness of the Gerald character. His queerness doesn't even get mentioned until the last 200 pages of the book, so his being gueer doesn't get to shape our opinion of him. He is also part of a group marriage, but that isn't mentioned til about halfway through the book. Both references are relevant to the storyline but said in passing, just another couple layers of this complex character.
There is also an important character, Xiang Bin, who is a poor and undereducated Chinese man, and Brin does a good job of showing that he is still clever and intelligent even though he is not very educated. Bin is also endearing and funny, a true underdog type.
For a while, I wondered if this book took place in the same universe as Brin's Uplift trilogies, and maybe the same universe as "Earth," but later plot points disproved this. I wondered, because a lot of the technology in Earth and Existence (such as subvocalization) is the same, there was a hint in Earth that the black hole was made by aliens, and uplifted dolphins appear in Existence. But now it is plain that is just some of Brin's obsessions, obsessions I happen to agree with.
Best of all, the ending message of embracing diversity is lovely; allistics, auties, neo-Neanderthals, and AIs all working together in harmony. Beautiful!
All in all, I highly recommend this book!
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This was cross-posted from http://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1195210.html
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