Earth by David Brin

*Some Spoilers Below*

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.

This is...not that book. That book might have been more fun.

Which isn't to say this is a bad book, this is just a book that is trying to do so much and get through it as efficiently as possible that it's a perfectly serviceable, and, indeed, ambitious standard science fiction novel. But it's not heavily a novel of character (although the characters aren't terrible), or of prose styling. It's plot, and that's not uncommon, and it's a pretty good plot, but oh my, are we ever trying to mash a whole bunch of things in there:

Climate Change
Black holes in the centre of the Earth
Abolition of privacy by law
A.I.
Gaian Theory
A floating nation-state
A conspiracy of the rich
Aliens
Gazerbeams (gravity something something something)

It's a lot, even for a book that approaches 600 pages in mass market format. Does it all hang together? Kind of? Each of the stories is more or less hung on a different person, not to mention the young men who die along the way, and we go back and forth between them at what is sometimes whiplash speed. Chapters are often only 5-10 pages long, which at least is better than those books that have 2-3 page chapters. I hate 2-3 page chapters.

Let's see, can I make the plot make sense? The world has already suffered through drastic effects of climate change, leading to a lot of climate refugees, hence the floating state. Privacy has been abolished, and old people with cameras are everywhere, monitoring the young. One of the prime movers behind Gaian theory is an old woman, with radical ideas that are both lauded and decried by the political/religious movement she started inadvertently.

But none of that is the main story. The main story is about the Gaian scientist's grandson, who was a physicist, who accidentally created a small black hole that escaped and entered the centre of the Earth. When he goes looking for it to find out how screwed the planet is, he finds that it's benign and failing, but a much larger and malevolent (does cancerous work as an analogy here?) one was already there. How did it get there? Aliens, maybe? (This thread is not much followed up beyond the theory and then a later encounter with a character that another character thinks is probably a benevolent alien in disguise as a human.)

The grandson embarks on a conspiracy to slowly move the black hole out of the Earth into space, where it'll dissipate harmlessly. To do so, he invents gazers, a gravity-beam that could launch spacecraft without any worry about rockets or combustion. He needs to keep this secret because...reasons? Because people might try to stop him? To provide some tension for the plot?

See, it's just a lot. I mean, A LOT. While reading it, it all hangs together fairly well, although there were moments where if ONE MORE PERSON decided they needed to put their hand on the wheel I was going to scream. Not everyone needs to interfere. We don't need a list that approaches double-digits. It's okay to focus.

So, yeah. This is a perfectly serviceable science fiction story, but it's trying to do too much, and ends up feeling, not meandering, but more that it expects readers to follow along as yet another person decides to poke their nose in the same business. It's a well that is gone to several times too often. Readable but not stellar.