Existence

"Washington was like a geezer—overweight and sagging, but with attitude. Most of its gutty heft lay below the beltway, in waistlands that had been downwind on Awfulday.

Downwind, but not out.

When droves of upperclass child-bearers fled the invisible plumes enveloping Fairfax and Alexandria, those briefly-empty ghost towns quickly refilled with immigrants—the latest mass of teemers, yearning to be free and willing to endure a little radiation in exchange for a pleasant five-bedroom that could be subdivided into nearly as many apartments. Spacious living rooms began a second life as store fronts. Workshops took over four-car garages and lawns turned into produce gardens. Swimming pools made excellent refuse bins—until government recovered enough to start cracking down."

Virtual avatars to offer prayers on one’s behalf in cyberspace? James McGrath explores the religious aspects in Existence: "The story has a strong and explicit element of the apocalyptic and millenarian, and the story not only touches on Biblical texts related to that subject, but also envisages several more end-times movements to have occurred between our time and that not-too-distant future in which the story unfolds."

“Is there such a thing as "The Great American Science Fiction Novel"? Or, to be less parochial -- in deference to SF's cosmic consciousness -- "The Great Global Near-Future Science Fiction Novel"? The GGNFSFN (I promise never to use that acronym again -- let's just call it the Great SF Novel from here on out) would be an ambitious, panoramic, macroscopic, and microscopic portrait concerning a speculative future that was near enough to the date of composition to allow for an assessment of its probability and extrapolative verisimilitude…But admirers of this type of novel -- and I'm one -- can take renewed hope with the appearance of David Brin's Existence. It's an overt claimant to the Zanzibar throne, and a worthy one, Version 2.0 of his similar performance in 1990's Earth.” Writes Paul De Filippo.

Existence revisits the Fermi Paradox, that familiar problem of how, given the sheer size and age of our galaxy, it is implausible that intelligent life has not arisen elsewhere and left visible traces of its presence. Brin's solution to the paradox is both intelligent and, initially, deeply depressing: that the minefield of threats that each race must survive to reach the starts is so extensive that very, very few make it. The novel's opening sections dwell deeply on the threats to mankind's own existence, from climate change and the threat of nuclear war to the possible 'threat' of super-advanced AI. The discovery of the alien 'guidestones' then provides a possible answer, but one which is not to our liking.

Tomorrow Welcomes the Bold! An excerpt-chapter from Existence.  It is set at a transhumanist convention in the year 2040. And the point-of-view character, Tor,  is using a LOT of augmented reality (AR) gear as she strolls the aisles, sampling hot new tech trends.. From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits. From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots. “Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,” she subvocalized for her report, letting the specs absorb it all...

The Future of Journalism as portrayed in Existence: Smart Mobs, Augmented Reality and Credibility Scores… Existence offers a compelling vision of leveraging the “wisdom of the crowd.” as the journalist Tor draws upon her personal smart mob to investigate a catastrophe in real time. She can take the pulse of the smart mob, asking for advice on what path to take next. She receives aggregate results from what everyone in the mob is answering, but with higher-credibility participants’ responses weighted heavily, and the mass of words and data interpreted and visualized by her AI assistant. - 

Existence….dares to envisage a future neither ideal nor rampantly dystopian…in which the least of our worries may be emissaries from the far-flung corners of the galaxy.

David Brin reads the first chapter of Existence, his ground-breaking new novel about our near and distant future.

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.

Too many authors and film-makers buy into the playground notion that cynicism is somehow chic and knowing. So many 50- or 80-year-old clichés are rampant (e.g. “hey look, I invented suspicion of authority!”) while nostalgia pushes aside what used to be our genre’s golden notion: that we in this civilization might find ways to improve, to solve problems, to become better than we were. A difficult task, fraught with many pitfalls. But too many portray it now as hopeless.

Tomorrow you'll wear the Web, immersed in augmented overlays. Your aiware glasses will ID each person you walk by in a global village of ten billion souls.  

When, the first message arrives from another world—from the aliens we all secretly hope/fear are out there—will we 1) prepare to do battle or 2) embrace an extended tentacle? In his epic new science fiction novel, Existence (Tor Books), David Brin delves into the multiple consequences of the first alien encounter.

David Brin's "Existence" is poised between sci-fi's high-tech hopes and its post-space-shuttle disappointments. It opens with a man floating in a space-pod above the Earth, deploying a long cable with sensors linked to his own perceptions, like a fishing line that feels. Routine space operations, novel technology: This is serious progress! But the job he is doing is the menial work of fishing for space junk: the thrusters, shredded fuel tanks and urine-icicles dumped in orbit by an earlier, more careless age.