Customer Reviews

Counting Heads

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 In the Counting Heads world, the idea of being a single individual is obsolete.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.

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.

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.

I've been a fan of Marusek's since I read "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" in Asimov's while in college. I loved the story so much I made my girlfriend at the time, who didn't like SF, read it. She liked it, too. As the years went by, I eagerly read each new story as it was published.

But I have to agree with the previous reviewer that Counting Heads falls short of the quality of Marusek's short fiction, and in fact I share most of the criticisms expressed in that review. Fundamentally, the novel isn't a *story*. There's no over-arching narrative to tie it all together. Technically there is -- the search for Ellen -- but this serves more as an arbitrary device than a real storyline. The Bogdan character could be completely cut with no real impact on the story, and should have been in my opinion -- he's boring and one dimensional (Marusek even alludes to this in one scene, in a wink-wink way, but I would have preferred not to have suffered through the scenes involving him). There are many loose threads of potentially interesting plot elements that never get fully develooped and are left hanging, which I won't reveal here -- but I'll just say that when I had 15 pages left I couldn't believe that the novel would be able to conclude in that short span of pages. It didn't. I was amazed by the sudden turn to a "B movie" action sequence near the end, and thought maybe Marusek had taken inspiration from the film Adaptation. When the ending did arrive, I just thought, how did we get here, with these characters, and why should I care.

I ordered this book immediately after reading Cory's review of it. I'm glad I did, don't get me wrong. Part of my criticism of the book stems from the fact that I had very high expectations. I agree with the previous reviewer, too, that the editors should be held accountable for the book's final form. The book, especially the visionary / evocative portions, have an enormous amount of potential, but I think Marusek needs some guidance in crafting a real story that sustains itself over the length of a novel, and that clearly wasn't there.

But don't take my word for it. If you are a science fiction fan, buy this book for yourself and make up your own mind. Marusek will be a leader in the science fiction world for some time to come. I can't wait for his next novel.

I enjoyed this novel but it needed better plot development. It also seemed like the author had so many good ideas (that could have been stories in their own right)that he cramed them all into one book.

I feel that I would read another book by the author and find his ideas fascinating. Any next book by the author would just need better cohesion, focus and a more plot driven story line. In this novel everything never really comes together, and when you reach the ending you leave the book wanting more answers.

Looking over some the reviews of "Counting Heads", a potential reader couldn't be blamed for thinking that the novel was written by an author who had infused his project with flashes of genius and generous dashes of enthusiastic Ed Woodsian ineptitude. However, although a lot of the comments about `defects' in the plotting are accurate, they are irrelevant to the kind of book we're looking at. It's like critiquing a dirt bike for not being able to haul home a dozen bags of groceries or drive the kid's soccer team to a game. Of course, a dirt bike's meant to take us places a minivan (which can do all those things) could never go. In a similar way, Marusek's narrative structure shows his audience things that would be impossible to convey by following contemporary SF's terribly limited schema. At the same time, he's not doing anything revolutionary, just borrowing good ideas from outside the genre in order to expand his capacity to explore a new world. In this, Marusek shares a lot of affinities with Mark Budz (check out my review of `Crache' for a similar example of the benefits of departing from the dominant SF conventions).

Marusek is dramatizing a time of social revolution and accomplishes it in a very striking and efficient fashion. So he tells the story from the perspective of members of the affected classes, the powerful and wealthy `affs', the clones who do much of the routine work, and the `Chartists' who represent the balance of humanity clinging to familiar old political values and economics. In addition, he optimizes his overall strategy to show a lot of what's going on in this society by expanding the roles his characters play in the story. The pursuit of a cryogenically preserved head forms a "Maltese Falcon" core to the plot of this novel, but rather than following the typical convention of that storyline, the pursuit of the head doesn't become the central preoccupation of most of the characters. The actors in this drama are involved in the adventure in much the same way that we really experience one--as part of their job, or as witnesses, or victims or witting/unwitting accomplices etc., and they become involved while pursuing their own private business. So by following the twists and turns of each character's ultimate involvement in the recovery of the head, we get not only a resolution of the story, but we also intimately feel the ugly new world order eating away the vestiges of the old. Although the notion of adapting the narrative strategy to explore different aspects of a world is neither terribly exotic or new (Zola and Dickens come to mind), it's certainly ironic that the idea hasn't been fashionable in SF for decades.

Of course, one byproduct of this story telling technique is that the plot loses some cohesion, each subplot moves at its own tempo and its progress may not relate to the others or obviously advance the `global' plot. Marusek addresses this by directly applying some of the oldest and most general dramatic principles. For instance, you can see that the story ends in a perfectly acceptable way if you observe that the end mirrors the opening status quo. There are a couple tricky bits though, the novel proper begins with the end of the introductory short story, and some of the characters are in motion when they first appear, just waiting for something to knock them in a new direction. The clearest example of this mirroring is the boy Bogdan, who first shows up looking for a missing computer, and his last action is to go off looking for a lost artificial intelligence. It's also worth noting that Bogdan's motives and values have changed in the course of the story, and Marusek's plotting includes substantial elements of character growth and development to fill in the chinks in "Counting Heads' looser structure. The plotting is simplicity itself, any purpose or action is met with progressively higher obstacles and greater frustrations. This happens regardless of whether the action has any direct bearing on the big picture, but the overall effect is to continuously build the tension. Overcoming, enduring or trying to get around the sort of reversals the characters face is the basis of drama and the foundation of a good plot.

It seems fairly clear to me that when evaluated by the appropriate criteria, "Counting Heads" is a remarkable achievement. I've tried to argue that most of the 'defects' attributed to the novel are simply results of Marusek choosing to tell his story in the best possible way. Naturally, there are flaws in "Counting Heads", some fairly serious, thus it only gets 4.5 stars. The worst is perhaps the bizarre decision to use a first person short story as a prologue and then later changing that character's viewpoint to third person-that is a grievous fault, and the story suffers right up to the end from it. Also, the clones subplot is very important, but still takes up way too much space, there's a lot of other material that deserved more attention.

Vivid and detailed, Counting Heads gives us an often-times bleak -- but undeniable -- vision of the future. As with the best science fiction, Marusek raises the stakes for the genre.

The story begins with a bang, opening with the previously-published novella "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy." This novella is so good and so sharp that it brought this reader to a halt when the story stopped and started again forty years later.

Keep going. It takes a little while to learn about the new characters and their situations, but the plot soon picks up, then accelerates to the end (which is a bit abrupt.)

Counting Heads is ambitious, dealing with the underclasses of a society which has achieved near-immortality -- that is, if you can pay. The characters are very real, and so is the world they live in. And it all makes for quite a ride.

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 complex and visceral characters. He can make a reader empathize with a severed head, a cocky computer, or a perpetually pre-pubescent retrochild like Bogdan: "Among the Cathouse employees leaving the building were girls with tails poking out through the rear of their skirts. Bogdan approved of tails on girls. He liked how the girls tied bells to them or braided them with ribbons, or did other interesting things to draw attention to them. What drew his special attention were the tail holes in their clothes that usually exposed a little sliver of bare ass."

Counting Heads is a great example of the best science fiction has to offer. The world of this book is complete and true to its own rules, down to the smallest details - the characters even have their own slang. The science is well-researched, extrapolating the promises we hear for nanotechnology out to the extremes of their logical possibilities. At the same time, elements of our present world are scarily recognizable: characters who can't afford real information watch the "probable news," then pop down to the Nanojiffy to extrude a little lunch.

Fans of Marusek's short stories will recognize some familiar characters in Counting Heads. New readers will want to go looking for his earlier work, which has appeared in several magazines and collections, including Asimov's Science Fiction, Scientific American, Playboy, and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection. Marusek was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1999, and he won the Sturgeon Award in 2000. Counting Heads is, as Robert Silverberg writes, "the science-fiction landmark we all expected it to be."

This book, set about 100-140 years in the future, introduces a lot of new SciFi concepts, and ways of looking at things. One concept, which is sometimes taken to the extreme, is the impact of the sense of smell, which plays a huge role throughout the book - and sometimes, in the case of "seared" individuals (commonly known as "stinkers") becomes hilarious.

However, the general story itself lacks cohesion. The first part of the book was based on a previously published novella, and doesn't quite fit with the rest of the book. Most of the book lacks action scenes, and the author seems to be trying to make up for this at the end, as he tries to culminate the book with a giant action scene, but it doesn't play out that well.

Having said that, the middle part of the book is excellent, and I really enjoyed it. I liked following the lives of most of the characters, and the technology is cool - I'd like to see more SciFi books set in the near future, as this is.

All in all, this book is a success, but it is doubtful that it will attain "classic" status.

Like earlier reviewers, I was introduced to Marusek through his short stories. He was the science fiction doppleganger of Thom Jones: a guy in his 40s who, in the early 1990s, up and started publish astoninshly assured and affecting short stories that put to shame the work of guys who'd been writing for twenty years.

Marusek's stories -- "The Wedding Album" in particular -- did right everything SF can do right and did wrong nearly nothing. "Counting Heads" is, alas, characterized only by the former characteristic. It has all the imagination and bigness of spirit of his stories, but he gradually strips his characters, and the plot into which they fit, of any coherent purpose or direction.

If I can venture a theory, it would be that Marusek convinced himself, or was convinced, that a Big SF Novel had to have a Global Conflict or a Grand Mission at its heart (or both). Averse to the well-worn themes of war, scientific disaster-aversion, etc., Marusek decided to make political-business rivalry / ambition the centerpiece of his Global Conflict. And, as wonderfully imaginative and insightful as he is about speculative science, and as sure-footed he is about human relationships, he has zero-nada-zilch insight about politics or business. Deprived of his most powerful tools, he was more or less hopeless to create a useful plot and ended up stranding his characters in all kind of awkward poses.

Neverhtless, for all that "Counting Heads" identified a heretofore hidden weakness in Marusek, it also confirmed to me all of his wonderful strengths, and all that remains is that he and his brain trust find a novel that truly plays to those strengths.