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.