Earth

Rating:
Summary: Realistic and thought-provoking
Review: Brin's 'Earth' takes place in the year 2038, and the portrait painted of our society 40-some years from now is so totally plausible that it's a little disturbing. By 2038, Earth's population has grown to over 10 billion, natural resources are even more depleted than they are today, and many people think that the population is on the verge of a massive crash. Brin's depiction of the way that various sectors of society deal with this concept is complex and fascinating.

Although many of the scientific aspects of the book were somewhat confusing to me, I was still able to follow the plot. I have studied quite a bit of ecology, have also had a few courses in geophysics, and I was pleased that everything Brin has included in his story is consistent with today's scientific beliefs. The structure of the novel is interesting as well; little tidbits from the general populace and their responses to the events detailed in the chapters are interspersed throughout the book.

Furthermore, the character development is excellent; many "hard" science fiction novels are more about the technology and the situations than about the characters themselves, but Brin has made his characters and their motivations very real and well-developed. Even the less important characters like Logan Eng were as detailed as the central protagonists.

There was only one thing that I did not like about this book, and that is the 'deus ex machina' (sp?) of the ending. I won't say any more because I don't want any spoilers.

'Earth' raises a lot of issues about the environment, the supposed superiority of humankind, the interconnectedness of all living things, the individual's right to privacy, and much more. Lots of food for thought and a fantastic book for discussion (I read this for a book discussion group, and I can't wait to hear what everyone else has to say about it). I haven't read anything else by David Brin, but after reading 'Earth', I definitely want to.

Rating:
Summary: One of my all-time favorites
Review: For a few years I was reading Earth once a year, just like I do with Lord of the Rings. Although it's not quite on the same level, it's a wonderful sci-fi. Brin projects a fairly realistic future with real people, real problems, and the truly cool premise of dealing with a microscopic black hole orbiting the planet's core.

The Gaianism (the dominant religion of this environmentally threatened future) was a tad heavy-handed at times, but still didn't get too much into the way to like it. Interspersed with the action were excerpts from the global Net, which augmented the story in ways that reminded me of what Pohl did with Gateway. This sort of transition helped a lot to make the epic size of the book feel much more manageable.

Brin predicted a few things that, like Jules Verne long before him, have since come true or have begun to come true. Central to the book is the Net, which was no doubt based on the Internet which was only a sapling when the book was written; since then the Web has exploded and is operating much like Brin foresaw it would. He even predicted the appearance of spam and the massive, daunting problems of sifting for information online.

If all this doesn't sound interesting enough, well, there's more to say for the story. Much of the plot revolves around a small group of people--in a society heavily biased against secrecy--trying both to conceal and to eliminate the threat of a black hole within the earth. The things they discover along this road make some very interesting sci-fi; it's almost hard sci-fi at times. Meanwhile the world is full of other people somehow connected to all this, or to each other. Some know what's going on or at least that there's a conspiracy, and want to know more or to direct the course of events to their own ends. A new technology that emerges--perhaps not even too far-fetched in its concept (owing to Brin's background as a physicist)--becomes the focal point of a power struggle. Most of this we see through the eyes of an interesting assortment of rather identifiable characters.

Earth is overall a worthy story that's just as good (if not better) the second and third time around. The "chapters" are even reasonably short for the most part, allowing reading on the go and keeping things from getting tedious.

Rating:
Summary: Better described as "soap box"
Review: I read Earth after seeing it on a booklist with Frank Herbert's Dune. The booklist compared the two favorably. I loved Dune, so I gave Earth a try... and hated it.

It's not that David Brin's goals are indecent. They're quite noble. And I think that's the downfall. I can imagine Brin tapping away with lofty expectations, expecting his novel to be a catalyst. Every sentence preaches.

Brin uses a lot of "guess what I'm writing about" hat tricks. He sprinkles his novel with a heavy hand. It can be a really entertaining style, but less is better. Obscure cultural and science references abound, based I suppose on modern day extrapolations, but tweaked enough to make the windup painful, fleeting enough to make it vanish once the setting is accepted. Easy come easy go.

Each day was a new short story when Earth was being written. I get that feeling reading it. The result is a mess of ramblings meandering all over the place, each its own work of intense art but not one a shelter from the intense preaching.

Rating:
Summary: Good exercise in thinking about the planet's future
Review: After reading the final page and closing the book, I felt like I read 800 pages of a story that I didn't care too much about.

OK, Brin does a good exercise in imagining what would be the Planet's conditions fifty years after he wrote the book. But that's it. In the middle, just so the story would have a plot, there's the thing about the black hole graviting through Earth's central core, and the struggle of a team of scientists to stop it and to find who was responsible for it.

I think Brin tried to hold all the world with this book, and came up with a flat story. Yes, it's nice to read some of the passages concerning ecological development in the Planet for the next half century, but that was about it. The characters appearances were so spaced and so inocuous that I didn't feel related to them; in fact, in the end I couldn't care less if they were able to save the planet or not. There's something else with Brin's books: he uses some complex concepts and explains very little of them. Sometimes the reader, being ignorant about the science facts that he's reading about, stops trying to understand, and then the story looses most of its fun. We could see this problems, altough in a minor scale, in books as "Startide Rising" and "The postman". I think Brin likes to create his stories trying to pass to the readers a sense of mistery that sometimes doesn't work well in science fiction.

"Earth" could be better developed in lots of aspects.

Grade 6.8/10

Rating:
Summary: Vaguely interesting, but too long
Review: After 200 pages or so I put the book down. The parallel stories were plausible, the future Earth was well developed, but it just felt like my time would be better spent reading other books. The characters weren't engaging and the book is just too long, so it felt more like a chore to read it than a pleasure.

Rating:
Summary: An American reader in Tanzania, East Africa.
Review: Well, I just finished Brin's Earth, nearly 700 pages worth. As almost always happens, the book suffers from the chronic plague of science fiction novels: the photos, title, and summary on the front and back cover always seem far more interesting than actually reading the book. I guess it's the phenomenon of the monster outside your door being scarier than actually looking it in the face. Or maybe there are a million great science fiction stories running through our heads, and it takes these book covers to nudge us towards their realization.

But getting back to Brin. He certainly does impress. His prose exhibits some real talent, and I relished lines like: "Trees regularly died for literacy in those days," or ". . . conveniently diverted censure form the real culprit. The designer of trees. The destroyer. Man himself," or "gets sucked down the throat of its own self-made demon," or ". . . she preferred by far her own obsessions over the distracting nuisance of his love." He even shows his literary bravado by commenting (perceptively) on James Joyce: "Only Joyce ever came close to depicting the real hurricane of internal conflict and negotiation, those vast, turbid seascapes surrounding that island of semi-calm that named itself 'me.'"

And the story? This novel is set in the near future, where nearly all environmental crises of today has befallen the world. Initially, I appreciated how Brin seemed to even-handedly look at humanity and our eco-emergencies from all angles: those who see humans as a cancer, those who think we can manage the planet, those who look to technology to save us, those who see space as a safety valve, the interplay of the natural world and religion, etc.

So far so good. But it doesn't take too long to realize where Brin's real loyalties lie on this issue. At the end of the day, he's a company man, who still has faith in current systems, in technologies, and science to save us. As if those very things didn't create the predicament in the first place. But what else would you expect from a NASA consultant who lives in Los Angeles?

Brin can barely contain his abhorrence of radicals who challenge the system. Such people, who often do address the real issues and the core flaws of our predicament, are not wise nor justified in Brin's mind, nor in this book. In fact, the one character that would be considered the most adamant activist through most of the book, ends up going crazy, almost personifying Satan himself, and tearing the world apart. Please, Brin, try just a bit to cover up your prejudices.

Even worse is Brin's thinly-veiled ethnocentrism towards indigenous perspectives (though he never mentions them by name) on the environment, which become even more clear in his afterward. Such deep-ecology thinking he calls a "shelter of ancient simplicities," "ancient tribes," or "looking backwards." On the contrary, I always thought that adopting more indigenous way was to be truly looking forward. He even says in the novel that ". . . logic and reason were paramount. They were wiser ways by far than the old witchcraft and impulsiveness that used to guide human affairs." Please. It's that vey very "logic" and "reason" that are the result of the human arrogance that destroyed our planet in the first place. That "old witchcraft and impulsiveness" (um, aboriginal/indigenous people, just say it Brin) were the human societies that actually created an equilibrium with their environment.

Brin even misleadingly seems to suggest (in his afterward) that research has concluded that all human societies have visited "depredations upon their environment and each other." Maybe that's true, but to what degree is VERY important. Would it be fair to lump the Sioux in with modern American society in relation to depredations on the environment? Did the Sioux cut down 94% if their native forests in 200 years like the Americans have? Brin can hardly contain his biases.

And there are other problems, though none half as grave as what I just mentioned.

Brin doesn't really construct a compelling narrative. He does do a good job examining various dimensions of the environmental crises through the voices of the radio, internet chat groups, etc. But there are so many characters that I had to keep checking previous sections to remind myself of who we were talking about. And his science descriptions seem so self-indulgent, that I want to say "Yes Brin, you know a lot of science, congratulations. Would you mind preventing it from muddling up the narrative? A narrative that hardly exists?" In the end we have very little tension, very little concern for the characters, and a fragmented story.

Brin is an author who deeply cares about the planet and what its fate may be, as we all should. But ultimately he is a status-quo apologist, one who has failed to understand Dorothy Day's trenchant quote: "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system." Brin's problem is that he has yet to identify the system as such.

Rating:
Summary: Great Epic.
Review: "Earth" is an epic novel by one of the greatest SF authors of our time. Author of "The Postman" and the Uplift Series, David Brin is nothing but magnificent. Reading this book reminds me of such masterpieces like "Dune" or "The Lord of the Rings." Although it is not as good as those other books, "Earth" does offer something new.

The book takes place in 2038. The Earth has been devastated by global warming. The USSR never fell. Canada, China, Russia, and Switzerland are the superpowers. South Africa never abolished apartheid. The United States is falling apart because of side-effects to global warming. Immigrants who are not accepted into open countries go to the Sea State (A State made up of floating cities and boats. Sort of like Water World.) for acceptance.

The book opens up introducing us to Alex Lustig, George Hutton, and Stan Goldman. They were doing secret research to harness a black hole as an energy source, but they failed and the black hole sunk into the center of the Earth endangering the whole planet.

We then meet Jen Wolling. She a biologist working on the Ark Project in South Africa. The Arks are enclosed environments that are created to keep the remaining endangered species from becoming extinct. We also meet Nelson Grayson, a black Canadian who immigrates to South Africa to see where his ancestors came from. Jen discovers that he is bright and she takes him under her wing and becomes his teacher.

There are several other characters like the three Indiana teens, the astronaut Teresa Tikhana from Texas, Logan Eng, his ex-wife Daisy, and their daughter Claire. There are so many characters in this book that it would bore you to tell you all about them, you'll just have to read the book.

The people in New Zealand try to figure and way to get rid of the black hole, but they find out even a bigger secret and the whole world must unite to fight off this new threat.

This book is so vast in scale that there are few books, as I said in the introduction, that can compare to this novel on that factor. The only flaw in the book is the ending. It's OK. If you've read it you know what I mean. It just does not live up to the rest of the book. Because of that I give this book a 4.5. You should put this at the top of your reading list.

Rating:
Summary: A Strange Mixture
Review: 'Earth' is a bit of a strange mixture: it is a considered ecosocial critique patched onto a not entirely serious B-movie disaster plot and terrible deus-ex-machina ending. Brin can certainly write, and 'Earth' is a great read (until the end), populated by many well-painted characters, from the major protagonists like Alex Lustig, creator of the world-threatening miniature black hole, to the minor roles, like the excruciatingly realistic middle-class teenage gangmembers in Bloomington, Illinois. Disregard the pulp plot, and it is also a highly thoughtful and perhaps prophetic portrait of a world which has suffered environmental meltdown and where privacy is a forgotten concept. Until the troubles of Worldcom, Enron and AOL etc., I had thought Brin's backstory of a global war against coporate secrecy was amusing but far-fetched. Now I am not so sure... something's going to have to give.

I'm also surprised nobody seems to have noticed its strong resemblance to John Brunner's brilliant and cynical early 1970s environmental dystopia, 'Stand on Zanzibar'. The setting and the structure of 'Earth', with its multiple storylines split by excerpts from imaginary nonfiction works and internet chatrooms, is strongly influenced by Brunner's novel, and Brin also directly pinches the figure of the 'mucker', someone who is driven to senseless spree-killing by the deteriorating environmental conditions. Brin's work is far more optimistic than Brunner's, however whereas I would still rate 'Stand on Zanzibar' as one of the greatest SF novels of all time, 'Earth' is disjointed, but fun.

Rating:
Summary: Technical Ecstasy
Review: The scientific basis for this sci fi novel is refreshingly plausible, and the narrative style is inventive and captivating. The characterizations are well done, though the characters' emotions are incomplete. In particular, the female characters lack je ne sais quois; though they are likeable, capable, and much better written than many sci-fi heroines, they aren't quite real women. Perhaps they are enigmatic even to Brin.
I enjoyed the round-the-world tour Brin offers, and I'm glad he didn't hesitate to take on a work of such broad scope.
A final word on the idea of eventual, inevitable convergence of human mind and internet: today it is a ubiquitous theme, but I give Brin credit. I certainly hadn't thought about it in 1990.

Rating:
Summary: One of my first, one of the best!
Review: This was one of the first serious science fiction books I've read, and ever since, there have been very few books that came at par with it. Truly one of the best in the genre.