Hunter goes hunting wild animals with a rake...

[phantom power]

7. Existence was an interesting and somewhat strange book

The whole book was (mostly) about exploring all the very very many ways humans might either off themselves, or be offed, and how we might do our best to navigate all that. And also, fermi's paradox.

So, in that regard, it was a little bit darker than David "Sunshine" Brin's usual style. But Brin is such an utter human-optimist, that he simply can't sustain non-optimism, and so the book occasionally seemed almost bipolar.

Like KSR's recent 2312, he's been experimenting with some blog-inspired stylisms (so now the conquest of the inter-tubes' attention deficit disorder is complete, having even infected novels - winning?). He uses a running thread of chapters through the book called "Pandora's Cornucopia" - and that phrase was arguably worth the price of admission.