You see the book on the store shelf and think, Damn, that’s an ambitious title! But then you go ahead and say, David Brin, make me believe. And Brin does, in Earth he’s created a masterpiece of modern science fiction. Perhaps even a masterpiece of modern fiction, in the same way The Old Man and the Sea isn’t just a fishing story and The Treasure of Sierra Madre is more than a Western.
Published in 1990, Earth was runnerup for the Hugo award for best novel and that seems reasonable. Brin uses the novel as way to correlate all the ecological concerns into a holistic nightmare; several times he repeats the statement that Humanity keeps postponing the Big Dieback by one last minute invention or intervention or another but that can only last so long. Desertification, pollution, overpopulation, overstimulation, good intentions gone bad are all worked into a coherent collision in the year 2038 with one final invention too many: the ability of Alex Lustig, a brilliant scientist, to devise a machine (which Brin names a cavitron) that can manufacture a tiny black hole.
When Lustig’s first effort comes online to power an energy generation facility, a riot causes a malfunction which ruptures the containment vessel and the singularity sinks into the Earth; this bit takes place before the book starts and we learn about it during conversation, more or less. Lustig has found a wealthy new backer to finance his search for the missing depth charge, which they hope to find and capture before it’s gravitational force devours our planet. In their work, the team builds new technology they intend to use as a radar/sonar analog but which manipulates gravity as a side effect. And the scientists find another black hole tracing orbits deep inside Earth, larger, older, and more sophisticated than anything humans could have made.
So their quest becomes a race to tame Beta, as they call this monstrosity, but lingering national governments working on their own cause troubles. All of which are multiplied because in 2038 everything, even deeply secret government systems, are connected in the equivalent of the (not yet invented at the time of the novel’s writing) Worldwide Web.
One woman, Daisy, is both an ultimate master of software which can infiltrate and defeat any security measures and an ardent ‘priestess’ of Gaia; when she gets an inkling of what’s happening, she bends all her effort and tools to gaining control of these powerful instruments. Will she win and in so doing erase all but a handful of people from the planet? Another woman, Jen Wolling, is Alex’s grandmother as well as the person who created the modern ecological science that Daisy worships and Wolling is not one to sit back, even in her 90s, and allow a misguided disciple to go so far awry.
Brin has thrown everything into this book. As I’ve indicated he has a powerful plot and quite a few good characters. He also employs non-linear techniques like short entries from reference and news sources (a la Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica) and brief italicized passages explanation the planetary evolution of Earth (the opening sentence of the novel is “First came a supernova, dazzling the Universe in brief, spendthrift glory before ebbing into twisty, multispectral clouds of new formed atoms.”).
He even provides an Afterward, to ensure that no reader misses the warning he intends with his story. We must understand that our planet is a precious resource that is to be tended and nurtured so that its bounty can endure for millenia to come and not be wasted in a brief greedy burst of consumption.
Highly recommended
BillSaysThis 
