David Brin
David Brin
Glen David Brinis an American scientist and award-winning author of science fiction. He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards. His Campbell Award-winning novel The Postman was adapted as a feature film and starred Kevin Costner in 1997. Brin's nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association and the McGannon Communication Award...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 October 1950
CountryUnited States of America
Science has learned recently that contempt and indignation are addictive mental states. I mean physically and chemically addictive. Literally! People who are self-righteous a lot are apparently doping themselves rhythmically with auto-secreted surges of dopamine, endorphins and enkephalins. Didn't you ever ask yourself why indignation feels so good?
One of the rules I try to follow is that normal people are going to be involved even in heroic events
Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.
Why must conversions always come so late? Why do people always apologize to corpses?
What point was there in pursuing an ever-elusive popularity?
I hate the whole übermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.
Learn to control ego. Humans hold their dogmas and biases too tightly, and we only think that our opponents are dogmatic! But we all need criticism. Criticism is the only known antidote to error.
I would normally never set out to write a trilogy.
But it is a delightful challenge to try to depict interesting aliens.
But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I'll bet you'll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science.
The measure of (mental) health is flexibility (not comparison to some 'norm'), the freedom to learn from experience ... to be influenced by reasonable arguments ... and the appeal to the emotions ... and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns.
I regret having been the bearer of ambiguous tidings.