David Brin

• 1. Introduction

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  David Brin's grandfather was drafted into the Russian army and sent to fight in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Brin was born on the 6th of October, 1950, in Glendale, California, to parents Selma and Herb Brin. Over the following decades, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novel twice, the Nebula Award once, and three Locus Awards. In 1991, astronomer Eleanor Helin discovered a minor planet and named it 5748 Davebrin. What kind of mind produces prize-winning hard science fiction for four decades? How did one imaginary universe win the Hugo Award for Best Novel not once but twice? And why would that same novelist end up advising NASA, consulting for corporations, and debating political strategy?

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• 2. The Uplift Universe

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  About half of Brin's fiction belongs to a single imagined cosmos: the Uplift Universe. Sundiver, the first Uplift novel, appeared in 1980. Startide Rising followed in 1983 and won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 1984, it also took the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The Uplift War came out in 1987 and won the Hugo and Locus Awards again in 1988.

  A second trilogy, sometimes called the Uplift Storm series, opened with Brightness Reef in 1995. It continued through Infinity's Shore in 1996 and closed with Heaven's Reach in 1998.

  "Temptation," published in 1999 in Robert Silverberg's anthology Far Horizons, picks up after the events of Infinity's Shore. In 2002, Brin co-authored an illustrated guide to the Uplift cosmos with Kevin Lenagh, titled Contacting Aliens.

  The Practice Effect, Brin's first stand-alone novel, appeared in 1984. A year later came a very different kind of book, one that would eventually find its way to movie screens.

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• 3. Stand-Alone Worlds

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  The Postman first appeared as a three-part novella in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, in substantially different form from the final book. The novel version, published in 1985, won the Campbell and Locus SF Awards and was nominated for the Hugo and the Nebula. Kevin Costner filmed it as a major motion picture in 1997.

  Earth, which followed in 1990, drew attention for something unusual in science fiction. The book contained predictions of trends that later proved accurate, with email spam among the examples the record mentions.

  Kiln People arrived in 2002. That year, it was shortlisted for four major awards: the Hugo, the Locus, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Each time, it finished behind a different book.

  Existence, published in 2012, incorporated an earlier Uplift Universe story called "Aficionado." That story had first appeared in Popular Science under the title "Life in the Extreme."

  Brin's interest in where technology leads society shaped more than his plots. His 1998 nonfiction book put that concern into a different form.

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• 4. Transparency and Truth

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  The Transparent Society, published in 1998, asked whether technology would force a choice between privacy and freedom. That book won the Eli M. Oboler Award for intellectual freedom from the American Library Association.

  Brin had been writing for academic and popular audiences for years before it arrived. His articles appeared in The Astrophysical Journal and Information Technology and Libraries, as well as in Omni and Nature.

  In 1989, he co-authored a volume called Extraterrestrial Civilization with Thomas Kuiper. Star Wars on Trial, a 2006 collection debating the science of the most popular science fiction films, came next. Polemical Judo: Memes for our Political Knife-fight followed in 2019.

  By 2013, he sat on the Board of Advisors for the Museum of Science Fiction.

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• 5. The Scientist in the Room

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  Brin graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1973, with a bachelor's degree in astronomy. At UC San Diego, he earned a master's in electrical engineering in 1978 and a doctorate in astronomy in 1981. From 1983 to 1986, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the California Space Institute, based at UC San Diego in La Jolla. Those years overlapped almost exactly with the publication of some of his most praised fiction.

  He helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. He serves on the advisory board of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. He also does futurist consulting for corporations and government agencies. In 2010, he became a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

  Brin designed the board game Tribes, published by Steve Jackson Games in 1998. He also wrote the storyline for the 2000 Dreamcast game Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future. The Life Eaters, a comic published by DC Comics' Wildstorm imprint in 2003, was drawn by Scott Hampton. A 2010 comic titled Tinkerers examined the causes of the decline of American manufacturing.

  Colony High, the first book in the High Horizon series, appeared in February 2021. Castaways of New Mojave, co-written with Jeff Carlson, followed in August 2021 and was reprinted in October 2023.

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