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53 of 61 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Major, exciting new sf novel, October 29, 2005
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 In the Counting Heads world, the idea of being a single individual is obsolete.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 felt more like I was reading something truly radical, new and exciting. When David was writing short stories, he was an exciting writer. Now that he's onto novels, he's practically a force of nature.
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68 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't Hang Together, November 21, 2005
While Counting Heads has much to recommend it, I don't think the novel lives up to its potential, nor to the potential of the author's work in short forms. Marusek is best at painting a nuanced & convincing future-scape. Nano-technology repairs the human body so that people live effectively forever; various lines of clones do specialized work suited to their types; "affs" (for "affluent") fight among themselves to control the wealth of the earth & its expansion into outer space; "free range" humans (non-cloned) form charters, or associations, which harken back to 19th century Chartism. All this is fascinating. Marusek has a highly inventive imagination & may well learn how to put a narrative together. His way of naming objects in the future demonstrates a clued-in ear for contemporary pop culture. The problem is that the reader is two-thirds through the novel before meeting an attractive character with whom to identify. In fact, the leading characters are insufferable affs. And through that first two-thirds, there really isn't anything you'd call a plot -- just a series of loosely linked incidents that serve to explicate the future-scape & that is the best of it. The final third of the narrative is a poorly conceived action / adventure sequence in search of a human meaning. Conclusion: Incident in search of plot; characters in search of personalities; an alternative world in search of a meaningful connection to experience. Counting Heads suffers from shallow editing -- there are some truly bizarre sentences -- but no matter -- a good editor might have insisted on some character development & might have prevented the final section of the story from becoming a not very convincing chase scene from a B-movie. The vaunted editorial team at Tor might have hammered this into an interesting book -- the ideas are there -- but failed to do so in this case.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, January 27, 2006
The first work by David Marusek I read was "Getting To Know You", in an a little anthology titled "Issac Asimov's Utopias." The story blew me away, and when I found out that he was writing a novel set in the same universe, I knew I had to have it, and waited with baited breath until its publication. I was not disappointed. The first part of the novel is "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy", a novella published in 1995 that introduces this world. I was pleased as punch to see it, as at this point I'd only read "Getting to Know You". As part of the novel, it is arguably its best part; it's tautly-written, and it pulls you in and doesn't let go. Part 1 is set in 2092-4, and the succeeding two parts are set in 2134, making the novel proper a kind of contained prequel and sequel. Marusek maps out this world--the "Boutique Economy"--in exhaustive detail, amazingly so given its modest length. It is a world both horrifying and hopeful; neither it nor its characters let you rest on your laurels. With its clones and de facto caste system, echoes of "Brave New World" are very much in evidence. Like Huxley's novel, much of the novel is darkly comic and satirical, but the author never loses sight of the human heart, and it is this thread of humanity that makes it all a joy to read. The plot is basically a murder / espionage mystery, but the writing style itself is also something of a puzzle. Marusek uses many acronyms and portmanteau words that are not immediately explained, but whose meaning becomes evident as one progresses through the work. By the end of the novel, I felt like I had put an intricate model together. This is great stuff. The only minus I can think of is that the novel definitely slows down a bit in the middle, before regaining momentum to a fast-paced, climactic conclusion. To be fair though, that could probably be said of many, if not most novels. In short, this is a highly-recommended read, and I only wish I could visit this strange world with its fascinating characters again.
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