Originally posted as review on Amazon.com here .
Just finished reading Existence by David Brin. Previously I had Anathem by Neal Stephenson as my favorite fiction for all time. Anathem was like a high quality grad course in classic philosophy, which is amazing for the price of one book. But Anathem's strength is its weakness: it is a work Plato could understand and even see as derivative, a creative extension to his work.
Existence, on the other hand, would merely wound Plato's ego, and he'd be lost most of the time while trying to read it. Existence is too hot with the new vistas of wisdom that have come about via Darwin and Einstein. Yes, I said that, wisdom has increased since the advent of Darwinism, and directly because of it.
Since the time of Einstein we've learned the cosmos is a violent, evolutionary place. Not the peaceful place Plato and subsequent Christian and Islamic traditions envisioned. Those traditions got it totally wrong, as to what is going on outside the Earth's atmosphere.
A word about 2001 A Space Odyssey. It has one simple thread and lesson. Humans became humans because we could fashion tools and more especially weapons. This worked till the nuclear bomb. Humans then go out into space, and the cosmos changes one of us into a star-child of peace. 2001 A Space Odyssey is a beautiful film and book, with a wrong, useless and dumb message: become peaceful like the cosmos.
Existence takes no pleasure in a violent and virulent Universe. The book offers that the only means of victory and peace is never ending curiosity, diversity, and transparency. Eternal intelligent, messy change via innovations that result in unintended consequences, disruption...and continued Existence.
There is immense contemplation of apocalypse in 'Existence', in a thread titled 'Pandora's Cornucopia', which methodically lists all the ways a civilization of sentient life (of any type in the whole universe) could epic fail to the point of extinction. This is one of the non-fantasy aspects of the book, it runs through the gamut of predictive models by John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi and other credible scientists. The book is a voluminous contemplation of species and civilization termination, with a positive outcome that is barely won with a lot of mental heavy-lifting and persistence.
Existence takes a firm stance on "humanity": humanity should be a collection of biological humans, intelligent machines, and resurrected Neanderthals. Any sentient entity that can follow the laws of humanity is worthy to be a citizen embolden with rights in the enterprise. The book includes a great deal about uploaded copies of humans into digital networks, with an ultimately positive portrayal of the experience. The uploaded copies even provide a great service to the rest of humanity that could not be achieved with their short-lived organic original selves. For what it's worth, I personally endorse this whole agenda.
Existence wholly condemns movements that want to turn back the clock on innovation, or even slow it down. The book makes a wise political connection that the super-rich have an alliance with movements that want to return to more primitive ways. In a collapse of industrial society the super-rich will be the mass land owners and slave owners in the resulting feudal order.
I'd like to indulge a little in my own thinking for a moment, keep in mind this maxim is not the work of David Brin, for all I know he may disagree with its tone or content. Taking the inclusive trans-humanism just mentioned (including humans, machines, Neanderthals) together with the condemnation of retrogression and technological renunciation, I believe resonates with my maxim "make the present and future world lethal to our ancestors, provided the result is a larger footprint of politically empowered sentient life."
A few particulars, not the core big message, that I loved in the book: Autistics and Neanderthals are very attuned to one another, and the descriptions of the Neanderthal children and teens are great. The segments with autistic dialogue are amazing, another language.
Existence has a clever structure, it is really two books. The first half, the first 400 pages, are entirely plausible visions of the near future. Plausible to the point of being truly useful for todays reader. Not just mind candy.
The second half of the book leaps forward several decades, and shifts tense plot lines into a different plot line. In this leap forward in years and plot line, the book becomes a little more fantasy than the first half, not so utilitarian of a read, but it does not become irrelevant. It does come up with a solution to the depressing message of the first half of the book. And the qualities of the solution are a good candidate for answering the Riddle of Existence.
Yes, I really said that: the book answers the Riddle of Existence. This book dispenses with wisdom in its most bona fide and potent form. A wisdom available to 21st century people. A wisdom not available to our ancestors.
Regarding the negative reviews on Amazon for this book: I can only see their perspective by acknowledging some plot lines simply terminate, functioning only as covering some idea which adds completeness to the book's grand thesis, but not the grand plot line. Maybe this is enough to remove the author from the gallery of greatest authors, and turn off some types of readers. Some negative reviewers mention many previously published novellas were integrated into the book, the author even admits as much in the afterword. For me the ideas, and the main cumulative idea, are extremely high in merit. The book has a non-artistic and utilitarian function offering an important grand message in today's smartest political/philosophical debates.
-Lance Miller March 17, 2013
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