Dans ce trop épais roman (900 pages, quand même) qui se situe dans une cinquantaine d'années, on découvre un personnage "principal" qui tente de lutter contre le trou noir qu'il a accidentellement envoyé dans la terre.
Je dis principal, parce qu'il y a dans ce roman une dizaine de personnages qu'on va suivre tout du long, et qui peuvent éventuellement être antagonistes, ou tout au moins avoir des intérêts très différents. Et en fait, l'existence de tous ces personnages tient au plus gros problème de ce roman : sa taille. Parce que franchement, 900 pages, c'est beaucoup trop. Surtout qu'il n'y a en fait pas tant d'unité que ça. Entre l'intrigue principale qui est assez claire ("est-ce que ce sera la fin du monde ou pas ?"), les observations écolo-gaïaistes formant un décor vraiment oppressant, et les évolutions de certains personnages dans ce décor, ça donne au moins trois trames qui ne vont pas forcément se croiser. Et c'est dommage.
Parce que franchement, la dernière partie qui se concentre vraiment sur la guerre gravitationelle est franchement plaisante. C'est juste dommage qu'il faille 600 pages pour entamer la partie intéressante.

De nuevo una novela de David Brin. Me ha encantado.

Un científico, trasteando con un experimento bastante peliagudo, libera un agujero negro que se va derechito hacia el fondo de la Tierra, empezando a oscilar y devorarla por dentro. Comenzará una carrera contra el reloj (y contra el agujero negro, claro está) para salvar a la Tierra de su fatal destino. Pero por el camino nuestros protagonistas se darán cuenta de que había muchas cosas que desconocían. Y hasta aquí puedo leer .

El libro está muy bien escrito. Lleva la acción con pocos altibajos y crece a medida que se acerca el final. Como es habitual, Brin retrata a la sociedad del futuro (no muy lejano, en torno al año 2040) con increíble detalle. En esta historia, la Humanidad, que cuenta con 10.000 millones de habitantes, ha conseguido cargarse la ecología del planeta, y tras las extinciones masivas de especies, la pérdida de los bosques y los humedales, la desaparición de la capa de ozono y el aumento del nivel de las aguas, por fin se ha comenzado a gran escala una campaña de cultura ecológica. Todo está muy bien descrito y es bastante creíble. Como el propio autor cuenta en el epílogo, hacer predicciones a 50 años vista es muy difícil. A 10 años “sólo” hay que ver cómo estamos ahora y exagerar ciertos aspectos. A 200 años la imaginación puede volar libremente (explíquenle Google a Beethoven), pero a 50 años vista, las predicciones no pueden ser locuras, y tampoco pueden dejarlo todo como estaba.

Hacia el final, el libro sufre de algo que ya había comentado de Gente de barro, otra impresionante novela de Brin. Los acontecimientos se disparan y el autor comienza a desbarrar de manera leve tirando a grave. Aparecen asociaciones mentales libres que el lector no siempre sigue, suceden cosas que no tienen que ver con el desarrollo estricto de la historia

Spoiler

(para los iniciados, el episodio del tigre y el dragón es levemente lisérgico para mi gusto)

y, en general, se pierde claridad. Pero bueno, parece ser la marca de la casa.

En cualquier caso, su lectura me ha tenido entretenidísimo durante más de una semana, lo cual compensa con creces cualquier otro pequeño fallo que le pueda sacar.

Le sobran historias, personajes y páginas.
Tremenda decepción.

Author [a:David Brin|14078|David Brin|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1190308062p2/14078.jpg] just posted a link to a video where he does a reading from [b:Earth|96471|Earth|David Brin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171312073s/96471.jpg|1218966]. But, this is not just a talking head video.



Brin's bookshelves and some kitchen appliances are visible in the background, but they will not distract because the reading is illustrated w/fade-ins to terrific astronomical spacescape photography and art, and not randomly either, but in synch with the passage Brin reads.

Brilliant, fun, and much better than those origins of earth and the universe films you remember from old time Science Museum FieldTrips or the day when your science teacher couldn't bear lecturing and qued up a movie after fooling around with the canister and projector, etc. Yes, his personal reading plaque reminds us of the ipad, the kindle


[bc:Earth|96471|Earth|David Brin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171312073s/96471.jpg|1218966]
[b:Earth|96471|Earth|David Brin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171312073s/96471.jpg|1218966] remains one of my favorite books. The way this book prefigures the internet and communication via social media and messaging is practically omniscient and a little bit spooky! -I have read [b:Earth|96471|Earth|David Brin|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171312073s/96471.jpg|1218966] quite a few times. It is entertaining, inspiring, and I like the parallel story lines. Brin's portrayal of technology and computer aided communication ages pretty well considering it was published in 1990.

His exploration of climate change and how an angry earth might wreak havoc on people's lives is even more serendipitous post-Katrina/Haiti/Australia you fill in the blank with the flooding disaster that still haunts you or is currently occupying prime-time.

Katrina?


Australia?

One of my all-time favourites, and a bit of a hopeful alternative to all of the doom and gloom dystopias I've been reading lately. Climate change is still a huge problem (obviously), and life is miserable for a lot of people, but there's still some hope. Great storyline, interesting characters, lots of sociology/religion/science/science fiction to love.

So this was actually the second time I read this; the first was immediately after the book's publication back in 1991.

Earth is a twisting together of a number of different narrative threads, mostly spinning about the effects of dropping a subatomic black hole into the earth. It's fanciful in that respect, and fun.

In this novel, however, Brin stuck his nose fifty years into the future and managed to predict a number of interesting things. You can see in this novel how early imaginings of a global network (i.e.: the Internet) and its citizens from around the world might act. It wound up being quite accurate, and it's kind of cool to see how things have played out.

It's as good now as it was way back when. 5 of 5 stars.

'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 gang-members 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.

That ending though!
I loved this book. You do have to be aware it’s written in 1989, but even so it’s great! There’s fantastic rep in this, diverse, human characters of both sexes, different classes, ages etc. Sexuality isn’t there though. He makes physics less obscure than it is and extrapolates his future brilliantly from what he saw around him. His writing itself was intriguing and well done. I loved all his references and descriptions and relationships. Also, it’s a sort of multi format, like a toned down illuminae. Absolute must read for science fiction fans.

The Large Hadron Collider is doing pretty well this early into its life. It has already produced compelling evidence for the existence of a Higgs boson. And it hasn’t produced a microscopic black hole that would sink into the centre of the Earth and devour us all. Yet.

David Brin wrote Earth around the same time I was born, long before the LHC was being built and its doomsayers were crying disaster. Even then, however, the idea of experimental physics creating a world-swallowing black hole was a potent one. At first, it seems like the black hole present in Earth is a sign of the ultimate hubris of humanity … yet as the story develops, it becomes apparent that perhaps the black hole is an interloper sent by others who aren’t happy about having new neighbours.

This sense of layers of revelation is typical, both of Brin in general and Earth specifically. In style, Earth is quite similar to the other works of Brin’s that I’ve read, particularly the Uplift trilogy. Since it is set closer to the present day—2038, a mere fifty years in the future from the time Brin was writing—it also has much in common with the hard SF thrillers written by authors like Ben Bova and Greg Bear. The main characters are, by and large, scientists, intensely passionate about their work and dedicated to ideals like “scientific inquiry” and “truth”. The antagonists are authoritarian or anarchical in their allegiances, out to preserve the old order or tear it down at all costs, with both sides looking to the latest and greatest in scientific discoveries to give them the edge.

So to distinguish it from other such books, Brin sets Earth in a near future where global warming has occurred slightly faster than most scientists have predicted. In this version of 2038, humanity is still paralyzed by a dependence on fossil fuels. Coastal regions are losing ground to the ocean even as inland areas find desertification has become a pressing issue. Though information technology abounds, obsession with the role of secrecy in last century’s ecological disasters has reduced an individual’s privacy. And sometime in the first decade of the twenty-first century (i.e., five to ten years ago, for those of us in 2014), the world declares war against Switzerland in a bloody-almost-nuclear debacle.

There is a lot to process here. Certainly Brin deserves credit for such an intricate and detailled vision of the future. As he explains in his afterword, he isn’t going for accuracy—which would be foolish because it is almost impossible—just plausibility. Each of the attributes of his 2038 is a consequence of the trends he observed in 1989, coupled with some creative speculation about what kinds of surprises might happen along the way. It has been a while since I read a book that so confidently and cleverly lays out the near-future—Nexus tries very hard but doesn’t quite make me believe, and Rainbows End increasingly feels like allegory rather than an attempt at extrapolation. So, in this sense, Earth is a very interesting work of science fiction.

It’s quite interesting to compare Brin’s vision of 2038 with our actual 2014, what with hindsight being what it is. Keeping in mind that he’s writing three years before the World Wide Web, but in 2038 the Net is ubiquitous and quite recognizable to readers in 2014. He predicts that we’ll have trouble advancing the space program beyond low-Earth orbit, despite the potential gains if we can tap asteroids for all their yummy resources. He speculates how the search for Earth-like planets will progress (or not).

The main plot, with a black hole threatening to devour the planet, seems like something out of the tabloids from a year or two ago. Again, Brin is slightly ahead of his time with this “prediction”. And if the LHC is any indication, then who knows? Perhaps by 2038 we will indeed be playing with black holes as a possible source of power. As far as black holes go as a threat in Earth, I like how Brin develops the tension very slowly. This is a planetary-scale disaster, but Alex and his companions manage to keep it under wraps for most of the book. They don’t go running to the media or initiate a full-scale panic. (Of course, when it does get out, the consequences are disastrous.)

Unfortunately, like much of the hard SF of that era, Earth spends a little too much time navel-gazing. Brin once again follows several different characters, many of whom never meet up yet whose experiences provide the reader with a slightly different perspective on the plot. They are also a way for Brin to explore his 2038 future, in addition to the somewhat random infodumps that he includes at the end of every chapter. Alas, I feel like some of these characters and story arcs could have been eliminated without adversely affecting the story too much.

Similarly, while Brin’s characters all come across as earnest, they can also be very flat. The antagonists are two-dimensional in their single-mindedness, and this effect is only amplified by Brin’s tendency to tell rather than show. This is particularly evident when it comes to the relationship between Daisy and her daughter, Claire. It’s not enough that we see the way Daisy neglects her daughter and her house. No, Brin has to remind us, and show us Daisy’s own thoughts, to emphasize that, yes, Daisy has lost the plot.

Sometimes I felt in danger of losing the plot myself a few times. Earth is just a little ponderous for what should be a sleek, high-stakes thriller. Brin spends the first three-quarters establishing the setting, characters, and stakes. And then in the last quarter, he introduces twists that seem to come from nowhere. Specifically, I’m ambivalent about Jen’s fate and Pedro’s possible true identity. In both cases, these twists make a certain amount of sense—and I hate admitting that, because they also feel like bad storytelling. Jen is literally a deus ex machina, while Pedro’s twist just seems like one more complication we don’t need if Brin isn’t going to explore it in more detail—and, this being the denouement, there is no time for such things.

As a result, the ending is somewhat messy and disorganized after a long, slow lead-in. Earth is a bundle of interesting ideas, clever predictions, and stock characters involved in a doomsday scenario. I’m surprised, in fact, that SyFy hasn’t optioned it for one of its awful TV movies yet. (The book isn’t as bad as a SyFy original movie, but it has all the ingredients to make such a movie.)

Reading Earth has been an interesting experience in an anthropological sense. It’s not what I would call essential Brin, though. I really enjoyed the Uplift series, in which Brin has the space to develop his ideas on a much grander scale. (Though, as with the conclusion here, the conclusion to that series seems to include one-too-many new ideas that weren’t really mentioned earlier.) If, like me, you come across Earth and are in need of a new book to read, then you could do much worse. I can’t muster too much enthusiasm, however, for books that are brimming with good ideas yet in need of so much refinement. Once again Brin demonstrates his strengths in big ideas and his weaknesses in creating connections in people to make those ideas matter.

I was trying to describe this book to people at my book club last night, and as I went through all the things it tried to incorporate, one person asked if this was a humourous book? It is not, but I can see how the hodge-podge I was listing might make it sound like a book where piling all these themes and technologies were be used to highlight absurdity.

Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook