To be fair, that summary does include all the major characters, so after the initial onslaught you’ll know more or less everyone who matters. That’s all just in the first 50 or so pages, and only listing the point-of-view characters. 4, a doomsayer SF novelist named Hamish Brookeman who is on his way to a meeting with a recently discredited US Senator, and just a few chapters later, the fifth main player appears: a Chinese “shoresteader” who ekes out a living by salvaging metals from the drowned buildings on China’s submerged coastline. Anyone?)Īfter another stop for a “Pandora’s Cornucopia” section, we meet major character nr.

(I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel in which a character and the publisher share names, by the way. Then the third major character is introduced: a reporter called Tor who is embarking on a cross-country reporting trip that will lead her much further than merely coast-to-coast. Then we switch to the ultra-rich Hacker Sander and his recreational sub-orbital rocket launch that sets off a second plot line, followed by the first recurring WAIST (as in “Wow, Ain’t It Strange That…”) non-fiction fragment. After a few pages of Gerald Livingstone, we get the first of a set of recurring faux non-fiction pieces from “Pandora’s Cornucopia”, which describe some of the myriad ways humanity may self-destruct in the future. Over nearly 100 chapters and almost as many brief excerpts between those chapters, David Brin skips back and forth between a multitude of viewpoints.

That opening paragraph may give the incorrect impression that Existence is a straightforward first contact story.

This sets off a long and complex plot that will change life on Earth forever. What Gerald actually does in orbit seems, at first, much less uplifting (sorry): he’s essentially a glorified garbage collector, gathering pieces of floating space junk for disposal-until he finds a mysterious glowing stone, which soon proves to be an alien artifact. The symbolism couldn’t be clearer if he waved a flag depicting the Sistine Chapel’s God’s-hand-reaching-down-from-Heaven scene. The opening scene of Existence, David Brin’s long-awaited return to novel-length science fiction, is a great set piece that’s meaningful in a number of ways: astronaut Gerald Livingstone is working on the border of Earth and deep space, literally between heaven and earth-and helped by a monkey, no less.

Existence by David Brin