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Originally Posted by NatCh
I liked Brin's Kiln People, and Glory Season, but I found Earth too aggressively propa-green-dist for my tastes -- it's not that I mind a story that assumes Global Warming as a setting/plot point, but it seemed he had to keep telling me about it (in a somewhat preachy manner) every third page, I gave up about 1/3 of the way through. Too bad, really, I found the story concept quite intriguing. 
One thing about Brin, that I like and dislike at the same time, is that he almost never explains anything, you have to figure out what's being discussed from context. That means you don't get the story line interrupted by a lengthy treatise on, say the political/culture structure of a colony world that's been cut off from the rest of the human diaspora, but you have to spend a lot of time/effort figuring out that structure from the contextual off-hand comments and interactions of the characters. It makes the story flow nicely, and it's a good intellectual exercise, but it can be confusing in the early part of a story. |
NatCH --
Run out and acquire Brin's Uplift books (Sundiver, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, and Heaven's Reach). Anyone who can have a character (paraphrasing here) experience 'a strong sense of deja-vu caused by a near-miss by a probability weapon' (he worded it better) is just not to be missed. That series is my favorite of his books, btw.
Xenophon
P.S. Sundiver is the weakest entry in the series, although still quite good. You can read the others without having read Sundiver, and not miss too much.