Counting Heads

COUNTING HEADS is a powerful first novel. Set in 2092 and later the reader experiences a fast paced engaging story. There are tons of fascinating, no awesome, tech and a rich backdrop that includes art (e.g. a roam through a 22nd Century art museum in Chicago), politics and the future's media. I'm guessing it's this cultural aspect of the book that has some comparing it to William Gibson's 1984 classic NEUROMANCER (which I read in 1986 in paperback, and again in 1991). It too was a first novel. I am willing to predict that David Marusek's - because of its characterizations mainly - will better stand the test of time. What's it like? Consider the Department of Homeland Security's No Fly Lists and the NSA's electronic surveillance projected most darkly. Without spoiling a thing I say with certainty that the well-foreshadowed ending was both satisfying and surprising. I was sped along just wanting to know how writer Marusek could pull together so much.

Most of this novel concerns the fate of a cryonically frozen head of an upper class lady. Along the way David Marusek introduces us to the future, circa 2130. It is amazing and dazzyling indeed. David writes in a style that seems to transport the reader to this future, visionary in the utmost, an apparent roadmap to this future age with it's near magical technology, including rejuvenation science, ubiquitous holograms, advanced A.I., clones, nanotech, and much more. I found this book to be a page-turner, and very realistic, these to me are hard to find. And this is the first novel by Marusek at that! The overall plot and character development were superb, and bear in mind that the ending does allow a sequel without any problem, if so, count me in...

Marusek's inventive view of the future covers a broad and busy canvas in this transporting first novel. It's 2092, nanotechnology rules and society is divided into three groups. Affs, the affluent, control most of the money and power. Clones - Applied People - do most of the work, based on their physical and personality type. Free Range humans live in crowded, competitive commune-like charters and scramble to find enough work to keep up their rejuvenation treatments. Everyone lives pretty much forever, barring catastrophic accident. Two of the main characters - Affs and lovers Eleanor Starke and Samson Harger undergo such catastrophes. Samson's takes place at the outset as his and Eleanor's amazing good fortune goes off the rails when Harger tests positive for Nasties. Nasties are viruses, toxins and nanobots left over from the terror wars. Although the diagnosis is mistaken, Samson is "seared," which means his cells combust when they die. Damaged beyond repair, he gives off a terrible stench and can no longer receive rejuvenation treatments. This first section of the novel comes from a previously published novella and part two takes up some 40 years later. Eleanor's power is at its height and Samson has gone to die in a charter house where a motley crew of people strive to make enough to keep the house bots functioning. But as Samson prepares his final good-bye on the day the city canopy (erected to filter out Nasties) is dismantled, Eleanor is assassinated and her daughter, Ellen, badly wounded. Eleanor's cryogenically frozen head is stolen and a fierce battle ensues for custody. Among the manipulative combatants are mentars, AI constructs who serve as personal valets, troves of information, communications centers and lots more, depending on how much their owners can afford. Clones do most of the actual fighting and Affs are, of course, behind it all. Marusek leaves a lot of questions unanswered, particularly having to do with the conspiracy behind the assassination and kidnapping. The world he creates teems with masses of people and even more machines. His characterizations are complex and the clones are particularly intriguing - a contented work force who enjoy conforming to type, like most humans. The plot is complicated, but of less interest than Marusek's vivid and intriguing view of this particular future and its inhabitants. An impressive debut which leaves room for a sequel. --Portsmouth Herald

David Marusek is one of the best-kept secrets of science fiction, a wild talent with a Gibson-grade imagination and marvelous prose, and a keen sense of human drama that makes it all go. Science fiction editors nurture short story writers -- many sf insiders keep track of the short fiction markets and watch with keen interest the writers who are doing good work there, but until those writers manage to get a novel out, it's rare for the field at large to take note of them. Writers like Ben Rosenbaum and Ted Chiang do incredible, brilliant work in short lengths, and the field does yeoman duty recognizing them with awards and approbation, but ultimately, the audience for short fiction is regrettably small. Marusek's amazing story "The Wedding Album" floored me when I read it in 1999, was a finalist on the Nebula ballot, won the Sturgeon and Asimov's Reader's Choice Awards, placed in the Locus, Seiun and HOMer awards, and left all who read it gob-smacked. It was the story of the AI avatars cast as a sort of wedding photo of a couple on their big day; the story traces the avatars' lives through thousands of years of technical evolution, through the Singularity, and out the other side. The story reels from heartbreaking to mind-bending like a poet on a magnificent drunk bouncing from lamp-post to lamp-post. I have a gigantic backlog of reading that I've promised to do, but when the galleys for Marusek's first novel, Counting Heads, came to my mailbox, it went into my shoulder-bag and has stayed there ever since, while I read it in sips and draughts, stealing every possible moment to read more of it, wanting to see what happens next and not wanting it to end. Counting Heads is the story of a humanity thrashing on the horns of the dilemma of too much of everything. In the Counting Heads world, the idea of being a single individual is obsolete. Some people are clones. Some are virtual. Some are avatars cast for some utility function and then discarded. Some are AI minders who babysit the others. Even families and households are fluid and multiplicitous: in a world as crowded as Marusek's, social institutions are necessarily larger and weirder than our contemporary nuclear families. Yet all is not well, for too much can be as confounding as not enough. Counting Heads is the story of a vast intrigue, through which an emergent conspiracy rockets a remarkable woman to near-empress status, and then visits upon her indignity after indignity. Her husband, Sam, is the main protagonist of this story (which sports a gigantic cast of fascinating and likable characters), and it is through his eyes that we see every corner of this amazing world, from its highest heights to its lowest gutters. It's hard to summarize this book because again and again, the plot hinges on wonderful, original inventions, and just describing the storyline would spoil too many of David's delightful surprises. I haven't felt as buffeted by a book since Gibson's Neuromancer -- haven't fel

What if nanotechnology made it possible to endlessly "rejuvenate" your cells, maintaining your body at whatever age you wished - 35, 19, or 8 - for as long as you wished (or as long as you could afford it)? What sort of person would you be, with your 120 years of experience in your 12 year old body, and still all the time in the world, to live every life you've ever wanted? Here's the catch: rejuvenation is expensive. In the year 2134, society is still a free market. Jobs are hard to come by, and all your competitors are as young and talented as you. Most work in society is performed by artificial intelligence, or by clones, "Applied People" perfectly suited to their high-demand jobs. The remaining "free range people" are either very rich, or utterly superfluous, creating and scavenging their lives as best they can. Science fiction fans have been waiting for David Marusek's first novel for some time; Counting Heads was worth the wait. In it Marusek offers up a complicated and charming dystopia, a society where the eternally young don't ever have to be alone, not even inside their own heads. Instead, they share almost every moment of consciousness with a mentar, an artificial intelligence complete with personality and mental skills far above those of the people they serve, each one custom-designed to intimately match each individual. These powerful computers manage the lives of the affluent, forever-young "affs," and the affs manage the lives of everyone else - not even death ends their influence. When powerful aff Eleanor K. Starke finally falls prey to her enemies, her death sets off a violent "market correction" of murder and intrigue, with her wounded daughter Ellen at the heart of the struggle. Whether or not Ellen will survive is left to the kindness of strangers: a collection of free rangers, clones, and wily mentars, all suspicious of each other's motives, all with their own problems and desires. The story takes place in and around Chicagoland, a city that's about to take a big risk: "What the city maintained, what the media trumpeted, was nothing less than the end of the Outrage. In recent decades, terrorist attacks had become ineffectual and rare, or so the experts claimed....Earth's biosphere was now 99.99 percent nanobiohazmat free. Any residual nanobot or nanocyst still dispersed in the atmosphere had gone wild, lost its virulence, and was no more lethal than hay fever. In fact, most nanocysts contained ordinary pollen, not the smallpox, marburg, or VEE they were designed to ferry. The big, region-wide filtering systems known as canopies that once had been the lifesavers of cities throughout the United Democracies were now, according to the authorities, little more than giant, very expensive air fresheners." Chicagoland plans to turn off its protective canopy, and no one really knows what will happen to the people who have lived under it for 70 years. Marusek is an artful story teller with a talent for creating comp