Existence

“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it's something to be eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and while it's minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it's possible for us to exist. What do I mean by…

David Brin has a new novel out, Existence Brin is on a book tour at independent book stores on the west coast and was in the Bay Area saturday, where he spoke at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, having stopped by at SETIcon II earlier. David Brin The book is nice and chunky, and is a medium future novel, somewhat in the spirit of Earth. I am told that the story also includes the beginning of Uplift as a side plot. David is one of my all time favourite authors, and while at Caltech, as a founding member of SPECTRE, the legendary Caltech Science Fiction Club, I hosted him for the first of…