Earth (novel)

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This article is about a novel. For other uses, see Earth (disambiguation).

**Title** **Earth**
Cover of first edition (hardcover)and the second edition (paperback)
Author	David Brin
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Bantam Books
Released	1990
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	601 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-553-07064-9

Cover of 1991 Spectra mass market paperback edition. Art by Bruce Jensen

Earth is a 1990 science fiction novel written by David Brin. The book was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1991.

[edit] Plot introduction

Set in the year 2038, the book is a cautionary tale of the harm humans can cause their planet via disregard for the environment and reckless scientific experiments. The book has a large cast of characters and Brin uses them to address a number of environmental issues including endangered species, global warming, refugees from ecological disasters, ecoterrorism, and the social effects of overpopulation. The plot of the book involves an artificially created black hole which has been lost in the Earth's interior and the attempts to recover it before it destroys the planet. The events and revelations which follow reshape humanity and its future in the universe.

The scope of the story expands vastly as the plot gradually reveals itself, bringing into question the future course — and even the survival — of humanity.

[edit] Predictions

Brin set this novel 50 years in the future from the time he was writing, using the book as an opportunity to predict what technologies might — at that future date — be taken for granted day to day. Three technologies he predicted, which were unheard of at the time, came to pass within only twenty years of the writing, include a media-centric, hypertext Internet, e-mail spam, and the proliferation of personal video recording devices.

Brin claims at least 15 predictive hits in Earth including:

The Web (In fact, the Web is similar in capability to, but different in detail from, Brin's global network. In particular, URLs are much easier to read than the numeric identifiers in the book)
Privacy as a vanishing commodity
Global warming sea rise
accelerated global warming that results in worsening storm seasons
subvocal input devices
manmade black holes taken seriously
crisis habitat arcs
eyeglass cams
eyeglass VR overlays on real environments
levees breaking on the Mississippi (Hurricane Katrina)
brain imaging->personality profiling
geological-scale sculptures
the partition of the Soviet Union
blogging
decline of delivered mail
lawyer programs

Other events in the novel have yet to occur, including

the creation of the Swiss Navy (or 'Helvetian Navy', as it is known in the book). The conciliatory attitude of the Swiss to Holocaust victims whose assets were stolen by the Nazis with the aid of Swiss bankers gives reason to hope that the world will never declare Switzerland an outlaw state, much less "nuke" it.
so far, no one is known to have captured or built a black hole that could migrate to the Earth's core.