Stands up well, for near-future science fiction, 30 years later...but large sections are kind of boring.

This book was revelatory for me in college. It synthesized so much about the world; environmental collapse, failed states, science as destroyer, science as savior, reporters as heroes, reporters as exploiters, blah blah blah. Reading it was exhilarating and exhausting.

Reading it 20 years later, I’m more aware of its flaws. A Jack Kirbyesque level of exclamation points. Prose that is all too often intrusive. More characters than I can keep track of. A whole lot of them could have been combined to good effect.

This is a book that needed a few more edits. I’m no book-reading slouch, but I kept having to flip back to the beginning to figure out which nerdy scientist, which brilliant matriarch, which Midwestern white-boy gangster, which renegade whatever the hell I was reading about.

But hey, there are rogue black holes with rudimentary consciousness, death rays, an abandoned space shuttle that flies again, gravity waves, and, maybe, Gaea herself waking up. A great and ambitious book, with forgivable flaws.

5 star - Perfect
4 star - i would recommend
3 star - good
2 star - struggled to complete
1 star - could not finish

I can imagine that reading this back in 1990, when it was first published, you might have forgiven the uninteresting characters, unnecessarily long slog of a plot, and unbelievable ending...because the book's elements of climate change and human negative impact on the environment might have been new to you, at least new enough to benefit from accompanying Brin on his 50-years-in-the-future "Gedankenexperiment." But if you've already given serious thought/attention to these things, you won't get much out of reading Earth--it seems directed at readers who are engaging these ideas for the first time. And if you can't get your brain-food out of that, you're left with the lame plot, slowly cooked up around unlikable characters and then topped off with big spoonfuls of implausible bullshit at the end, complete with deus-ex-machina cherry on top.

So, if you're going to read this, keep a bucket handy. You'll want to purge it out of your memory, to make room for something better...which surprisingly, can be found in Brin's latest book, Existence.

Existence reads like a do-over of what Brin tried to do with Earth (minus the Earth-Mommy crap), only this time he's a much better writer, and (for the most part) succeeds at creating a dense, interesting story intertwined with thought-provoking reflections upon humanity...you know, good sci-fi. Anything worthwhile in Earth is re-mixed & improved in Existence, so don't worry that you're missing out on anything by avoiding Earth.

A sci-fi favorite with heavy environmental overtones. It boggles my mind this wasn't more popular; I dip back into it every few years, as the Web continues to eat pop culture, and am impressed by how much Brin got right, even if some of the itty-bitty details aren't spot-on.

Thankfully, Kevin Costner's already botched one Brin novel, and it wasn't this one; here's hoping he won't try another.

The 50 years in the future novel is supposed to be the hardest kind of SF to write. David Brin did it brilliantly with Earth. This novel looks at the development of the internet/usenet, the birth of the environmental crusade, and then throws in a tasty bit of technology. This novel shows you where the planet is headed, and makes you wonder about the decisions you will make in the next 50 years. Hell of a read, especially when you consider that it was written in 1991! The characters are a little poorly developed in parts, and the software metaphors require some mental adjustments (ferret programs instead of google). All in all however a bravura piece of writing, top stuff.

Earth, the blue marble.
This book, a marvel.

No, the above statement(s) wasn't meant to be poetic - but it's utterly true.

Where to begin in summing up this book …

A young and brilliant scientist has created an itty-bitty tiny artificial black hole … and lost it "somewhere" in the center of the planet. While he is looking for it together with some allies, earthquakes start shaking the planet and a space station is lost. The reason is rather awesome (

Spoiler

because I had thought of a lot of possibilities but not a SECOND tiny black hole and "the laser"

). I mean, we dodged quite the bullet there ... now, if only there weren't still so many other bullets to dodge!
But there is also the scientist's grandmother, herself a brilliant geneticist and founder of a new world religion, Gaianism. And she has either a god complex or other mental health problems. *lol* In any case, her observations are most often correct but she's also a force to be reckoned with that could become a problem.
Then there is the space pilot who witnessed the earthquakes and disaster with the space station first-hand and is consequently roped into the whole retrieval affair.
All that while secrecy is basically outlawed and technology (such as smart glasses that record and stream absolutely everything) is also making it insanely difficult for people not to know everything. Now of all times when they could use a bit of secrecy. Kinda.

Oh, in case anyone was wondering, the year is 2038 and Earth is pretty much fucked. Thanks to global warming, overfishing, overfarming and other "nice" things we human did/do, there are billions of ecological refugees, more radical "religions" than I cared to keep track of and the whole political Spiel has become even more ludicrous. The space program has also been abandoned so as to spend the money on Earth (oh, the irony).
Then there are the arks - several places around the globe that keep species in order to preserve them. Some of those even use genetic material to clone / mix species (bringing "back" the mammoth amongst other things).

In short: the book shows the impact we humans can have on the planet, good and bad.

The amazing thing about this? The book was published in the 80s!!!
Yep, it won the HUGOs in 1989 but predicted stuff like the internet (especially with regards to it becoming the major source for news), hyperlinks in electronic correspondence, spamming, a reduction in privacy / the need to share all kinds of stuff with the world online, levees breaking on the Mississippi (this was especially creepy because his exact prediction came true in 2005), voice controlled tech, global warming / the consequently rising sea levels, smart glasses and VR overlays, and much more!

And Brin uses all this to address critical topics (that are even more timely NOW) such as endangered species, global warming, production in and transport of goods from faraway countries (and the effects), refugees from ecological disasters, ecoterrorism, views on colonialism (less about racism and more about the audacity of the cultural theft) and the social effects of overpopulation. All while we're hunting for a black hole (two, actually, and beta's creator) before the destruction of the entire friggin planet! *lol*
And let me tell you, the revelation about the creator of beta … (

Spoiler

not only did I not really expect it to have been aliens, it all made perfect scientific sense - from the brilliant tactic of how to take out humanity to the answer to the age-old question why we haven't met other sentient species and lots of them already

)!
As if that wasn't enough, THAT revelation got eclipsed by

Spoiler

fucking Daisy

being the big bad. I mean, I never

Spoiler

liked her - right in the beginning when we first met her, I immediately despised her

but finding out just how

Spoiler

crazy the bitch really is

had me raging.

Seriously, the scope of this book is almost unimaginable and thinking about when it was written is even more mindboggling.

The writing style is very fast-paced, has a nice rhythm/flow to it, is simplistic rather than pompous, but never boring or flat. Will it surprise you after all my fangirling that an author who is so great at writing such a thrilling story that moves at break-neck speed, incorporating so many technological and scientific concepts flawlessly, is also a PhD in physics?

This has instantly become one of my favorite (sci-fi) books of all time!

One of those not-too-distant future books about life as we might imagine it. Some of the technology ideas are not so far off what we are coming to today.

A very long slog of a book. With an ending that just doesn't seem to go well with it.
I read it and I don't know if I can really recommend it, but I was able to finish it so it get's three stars.
I will say that the author did a pretty good job of perdicting some of the things that would come about from the internet.