You'll find him in Grolier's Multimedia Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Type keyword Hard SF for a hard-core subgenre that hews true to hard science. Enter Brin, David, and you'll learn that he is, with one possible exception (Bear, Greg), "the most important author of Hard SF to appear in the 1980s."
Brin, 45, is a space physicist and author of the bestselling Uplift series, which, says Grolier's, is "as compulsive reading as anything ever published in the genre." Brin's Startide Rising (1983), winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and his mainstream novel The Postman have been optioned for feature films. But aficionados of high tech and social change were most stirred by Brin's Earth, which predicted in 1988 how the World Wide Web would revolutionise the Net. Brin's first nonfiction effort, The Blinding Fog: Privacy and Paranoia in the Information Age, is near completion and will take an iconoclastic gander at the infobahn.
Wired: In your introduction to The Blinding Fog, you project two disparate visions. One foresees police cameras on every lamppost. In the other, average citizens can access universal tools of surveillance. Is this our choice - Big Brother, or a world of Peeping Toms?
Brin: Make no mistake, the cameras are coming. Already a dozen British cities aim police TV down scores of city blocks. Crime falls, but how long before those zoom lenses track faces, read credit card numbers, or eavesdrop on private conversations? You can't stop this Orwellian nightmare by passing laws. As Robert Heinlein said, the only thing privacy laws accomplish is to make the bugs smaller. In a decade, you'll never know the cameras are there. Those with access to them will have devastating advantages.The only alternative is to give the birdlike power of sight to everybody. Make the inevitable cameras accessible so anyone can check traffic at First and Main,look for a lost kid, or supervise PC McGillicudy walking his beat. Only this way will the powerful have just as much - or little - privacy as the rest of us.
Members of the cypherpunk movement have been promoting encryption as a safeguard of personal privacy. But you don't buy it.
Foremost among reasons why encryption won't work is that secrecy has always favoured the mighty. The rich will have resources to get around whatever pathetic barriers you or I erect, while privacy laws and codes will protect those at the top against us. The answer isn't more fog but more light: transparency. The kind that goes both ways.You think privacy will become extinct?
Like the dodo. But there is a way to limit the damage. If any citizen can read the billionaire's tax return or the politician's bank statement, if no thug - or policeman - can ever be sure his actions are unobserved, if no government agency or corporate boardroom is safe from whistle-blowers, we'll have something precious to help make up for lost privacy: freedom.You wrote Earth in 1988 before the Web became a media catch phrase. As a science fiction writer, where did you get it right? And wrong?
I thought Earth would get attention for the ecological speculations and such. Surprisingly, my depictions of a future infoweb raised the most interest. My WorldNet seemed to me a natural outgrowth of what people do with new technology. Some waste time. Others try to elevate the human condition. But most use it simply as another tool, a necessity of life. A routine miracle, like refrigerators and telephones.What intrigues me is how society's contrary interest groups might use info-tech - first to mobilise, but then to argue, expose lies, and hold each other accountable. Mutually enforced accountability is the key to running a complex society that can no longer afford to make big mistakes.
What do you mean by mutual accountability?
In all history, humans found just one remedy for error - criticism. But criticism is pain-ful. We hate receiving it, though we don't mind dishing it out. It's human nature. We've learned a hard lesson - no leader is ever wise enough to make decisions without scrutiny, commentary, and feedback. It so happens those are the very commodities the WorldNet will provide, in torrents. Try to picture multitudes of citizens, each with access to worldwide databases and the ability to make sophisticated models, each bent on disproving fallacies or exposing perceived mistakes. It's a formula for chaos or for innovative, exciting democracy - if people are mature enough.Recently, many have noticed similarities between bits of your 1985 novel, The Postman, and statements from America's militia movement.
One of a writer's greatest satisfactions comes from inventing interesting villains.The American mythos always preached suspicion of authority, a basically healthy social instinct that helped keep us free. But the message turns cancerous when it turns into solipsism - that is, the notion that an individual's self-righteous roar has more value than being a member of a civilised society. In countless popular books and films, the individual protagonist can do no wrong, but every institution is depicted as inherently corrupt. Yet, despite this pervasive propaganda, many resist the sweet lure of self-centredness. Instead of rage, they offer argument, passion, criticism, even cooperation. The Postman was about choosing between solipsism and rebuilding a living community. We all choose each day.
Sheldon Teitelbaum (shelit@aol.com) is a Los Angeles-based senior writer for The Jerusalem Report and a special correspondent for Sci Fi Universe.