Talk:Earth (Brin novel)

Recap of a failed VfD

from VfD:

Delete this paragraph of nonsense. AlainV 03:53, 2004 May 20 (UTC)

• Delete. Reads like someone's sandbox noodlings. Alcarillo 05:10, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
• I tried to put this up for speedy deletion as nonsense, but it got reverted. Oh, well. I was confident it would show up here eventually. I still say delete. - Lucky 6.9 05:35, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
• I think he's talking about the David Brin novel. On that basis, I added an introductory line. MK 05:53, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
• Keep if this can be sorted out. Brin's novel is real. I am not sure how relevant is the original text since it has been a while since I read the novel. Andris 15:28, May 20, 2004 (UTC)
• Brin's novel did involve a black hole as a major plot point which is why I assumed it was the book the original poster was referring to. MK 16:29, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
• I've replaced the speculation/commentary with a summary of the book, as best I can given that I don't have it and haven't read it. Niteowlneils 18:14, 20 May 2004 (UTC)
  • I've read it, although not recently, and I added some more details. MK 05:42, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, the present version is a fairly good summary of the novel. ping 06:41, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, now a good summary. -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 22:15, 21 May 2004 (UTC)
• Keep, looks fine now. RossA 02:54, 24 May 2004 (UTC)

'end moved discussion

Inaccurate and misleading summary, lacking citations elsewhere

I have read the book, and a few things jump out at me. First off, the book does (partially) revolve around an object that is thought to be a micro black hole, probably a relic of the Tunguska explosion, but that object is later found to be a more exotic object of artificial origin. The summary also implies that the object is human-made, yet this is not the ultimate conclusion drawn by the characters in the book. David Brin deserves credit for many prescient predictions, but the internet and the World Wide Web are not among them. This novel was published in 1990, which is a time when Tim Berners Lee was already working on and finalizing the first web browsing software — see the history of the World Wide Web. Brin might have a valid claim with blogging. Far more troublesome for the section titled Predictions is that it is entirely without citations. The section begins with a statement that David Brin wrote the book specifically to speculate about what future technologies might be taken for granted day-to-day. While David Brin may have written this book with that goal in mind, there is no citation for this. (Such a statement might be found in the Foreword of some edition of the book, but it needs to be properly cited.) Later in the section, a list of purported predictions is preceded by: "Brin claims at least 15 predictive hits in Earth including [...]" Besides the omission of the comma before "including", we again have no citation to back this up. The edition of the book I read clearly doesn't include a list of predictions, since I read the book a scant year or two after first publication. I'm sure Brin made some claims, but they were published either in a subsequent edition or in another publication altogether. Without the citation, we might as well be putting words in Brin's mouth. 204.17.31.126 (talk) 22:26, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Spoiler warning

Why was a spoiler warning added? There's no plot outcomes revealed in the article. MK2 06:03, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

: It's been removed. —Seqsea (talk) 04:14, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

List of predictions

That list of "predictions" could probably be cleaned up - If one didn't know better, it makes it sound like Brin was the first person ever to predict the Internet (c'mon, we all know Al Gore invented it way before this book was written!) - but seriously, pretty much anything by William Gibson has him beat (and he may not have been the first, either). Also - Global warming sea rise?!? Give me a break, it was an established scientific theory for years before this novel was written! And what the heck is a "lawyer program"? -- Antepenultimate 22:02, 10 January 2007 (UTC)

Pity that this would be OR, but from my reading, no one predicted it as accurately as he did: Hypertext, multi-media, news feeds, email spam. Back in 1990, all we basically had was text; there was no MIME format, no HTML, and first hint of SPAM probably came with AOL in '92. Gibson, to wit, has stated (so I heard) that he never used a computer until long after he wrote Neuromancer. And from a technological standpoint, the only thing Gibson had right was a vague notion of internet security meta-techniques (ie, firewalls, though he imagined them much more iconically than we do today). I used to read quite a lot of 'classic' sci-fi, and Brin, despite the fact that he is not considered a cyberphunk author, and that most of the rest of his novels suck, was the most accurate so far. (But it would be nice if Neal Stephenson's the Diamond Age ever comes close to reality.) --Otheus 15:52, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Surely the first hint of SPAM was regular junk snail mail. We have email, we have junk snail mail; its insightful but not exactly genius to predict the two would combine. Brin was insightful, but he's not a seer as the tone of the 'predictions' section seems to imply. Much of what he predicted was a case of taking things that existed, things that were being speculated upon/worked on, and adding them to a knowledge of how human society already operated. This requires effort and intelligence, but its not magic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.66.66.67 (talk) 17:11, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

It's a bit much to claim the nuking of Switzerland as a "predictive hit", don't you think? I mean, I suspect I would remember hearing about something like that if it had actually happened, which it hasn't. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.196.28.58 (talk) 21:37, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

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