Join Amazon Prime and ship Two-Day for free and Overnight for $3.99. Already a member? Sign in.

Quantity:

More Buying Choices

40 used & new from $2.45

Have one to sell? Sell yours here

Tell the Publisher! I�d like to read this book on Kindle Don�t have a Kindle? Get yours here.

Counting Heads (Hardcover)

by David Marusek (Author)
Key Phrases: paste canister, null suite, groundskeeper uniform, Wee Hunk, Belt Hubert, Starke Enterprises (more...)

3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

List Price:	$24.95
Price:	$24.95 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Temporarily out of stock.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

9 new from $24.95 24 used from $2.45 7 collectible from $60.00

Also Available in:	List Price:	Our Price:	Other Offers:
Paperback (Bargain Price)			11 used & new from $7.55
Paperback	$14.95	$10.17	38 used & new from $2.79
Audio Download (Audible.com)	$54.99	$28.87

Frequently Bought Together

Price For All Three: $51.62

Some of these items ship sooner than the others. Show details

This item: Counting Heads by David Marusek
Temporarily out of stock.
Order now and we'll deliver when available. We'll e-mail you with an estimated delivery date as soon as we have more information. Your account will only be charged when we ship the item.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
Mind Over Ship by David Marusek
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Cyberabad Days

by Ian McDonald

5.0 out of 5 stars (6) $10.20

River of Gods

by Ian McDonald

4.0 out of 5 stars (46) $14.38

The Caryatids

by Bruce Sterling

2.6 out of 5 stars (13) $16.50

Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

3.6 out of 5 stars (42) $9.98

Halting State (Ace Science Fiction)

by Charles Stross

3.9 out of 5 stars (61) $7.99

› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This extraordinary debut novel puts Marusek in the first rank of SF writers. Life on Earth in 2134 ought to be perfect: nanotechnology can manufacture anything humans need; medical science can control the human body's shape or age; and AIs, robots and contented clones do most of the work. If only there were a way to get rid of the surplus people. When Eleanor Starke, one of the major power brokers, is assassinated, her daughter's cryogenically frozen head becomes the object of a quest by representatives of several factions, including Eleanor's aged and outcast husband, a dense zealot for interstellar colonization, a decades-old little boy and husband and wife clones who are straining at the limitations of their natures. Marusek's writing is ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny, as he forces readers to stretch their imaginations and sympathies. Much of the fun in the story is in the telling rather than its destination—which is just as well, since it doesn't so much come to a conclusion as crash headlong into the last page. But the trip has been exciting and wonderful.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics compared this debut SF novel to works by Charles Stross, Rudy Rucker, John Wright, and even Philip K. Dick. Marusek examines present-day trends in technical and scientific advances, projects the social, biological, economic, and political consequences of such progress—and runs with it. Yet, although the author "is unstintingly generous in his speculations," notes SciFi.com, he is also "convincingly realistic." Inventive set pieces, complex and cliché-free characters with ordinary aspirations, and blurred lines between "real" and "artificial" thrilled all reviewers. Only the ending rang false in its brevity, suggesting that perhaps a sequel may be on its way.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition ~1st Printing edition (October 20, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0765312670
ISBN-13: 978-0765312679
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #89,638 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
paste canister, null suite, groundskeeper uniform, valet system, usher line, null room, personality bud, pressure gate, brick drive, portable tank, crash cart

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Wee Hunk, Belt Hubert, Starke Enterprises, Applied People, Myr Starke, Roosevelt Clinic, Ellen Starke, Myr Kodiak, South Gate, Inspector Costa, Eleanor Starke, Blue Team, Homeland Command, Myr Meewee, Book of Russ, Green Hall, Myr Harger, Annette Beijing, Nameless One, Soldier Field, Veronica Tug, Houseer Dieter, Reilly Dell, Line Drive, Myr Londenstane

New!
Concordance | Text Stats

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

	85% buy the item featured on this page: Counting Heads 3.7 out of 5 stars (30) $24.95
	6% buy Mind Over Ship 4.8 out of 5 stars (6) $16.47
	4% buy Cyberabad Days 5.0 out of 5 stars (6) $10.20
	3% buy The City & The City 4.3 out of 5 stars (51) $17.16

Explore similar items

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

(What's this?)

Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.

wait for paperback(3)

fiction(2)

bookie(1)

interested(1)

investigate me(1)

science fiction(1)

watches(1)

See all 9 tags...

Help others find this product — tag it for Amazon search

No one has tagged this product for Amazon search yet. Why not be the first to suggest a search for which it should appear?

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Customer Reviews

30 Reviews

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

3.7 out of 5 stars (30 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't Hang Together, November 21, 2005

By	Joseph Duemer (South Colton, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

Comment Comments (2) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Major, exciting new sf novel, October 29, 2005

By	Cory Doctorow "SF author, activist, blogger, ... (London, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent , January 27, 2006

By	John Me Wallace "Keymaster of Gozer" (San Antonio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 30 customer reviews...

Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars A nice start but...
The first part of this novel was published as a short story and I was stunned. It was the best piece of writing I had seen in a long time. Read more

Published 25 days ago by Bob E

5.0 out of 5 stars Count Me In
COUNTING HEADS is a powerful first novel. Set in 2092 and later the reader experiences a fast paced engaging story. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Gary Shea

2.0 out of 5 stars Set up and let down
Despite a wonderfully detailed and nuanced backround of future tech and society, the author's central characters are tossed aside before the end for other peripheral characters... Read more

Published 3 months ago by J. Burke

2.0 out of 5 stars A book that promises much but delivers little
This is not so much a single novel as a 36-page novella ("We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy") followed by a semi-related novel. Read more

Published 19 months ago by John Caruso

4.0 out of 5 stars A Creative Challenge to Read
Any writing out of the ordinary runs the risk of being misunderstood, disliked, or put aside because it demands more effort from the reader. Read more

Published 23 months ago by Daniel Raphael

2.0 out of 5 stars absolutely no discernable plot line
Whoever waited for this novel should wait longer. I will admit I read it all the way through....only to see how he tied all the various wide ranging threads of the plot together... Read more

Published on October 29, 2006 by sci fi fan

2.0 out of 5 stars Nothing Original
Although there are some interesting concepts in this novel, my overall impression is "nothing new." The nano and cloning treatments are light weight versions of Bear, Morgan,... Read more

Published on October 7, 2006 by Kenneth G. Schalhoub

5.0 out of 5 stars Visionary Science Fiction
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. Read more

Published on September 15, 2006 by Kevin Spoering

3.0 out of 5 stars An Underwhelming Success
I have been reading science fiction for quite a long time as well as many of you other reviewers. I also have had the good fortune to write a book of my own and to write book... Read more

Published on July 29, 2006 by Christopher A. Fraas

5.0 out of 5 stars A SciFi Classic
I have been reading science fiction for the past 50 years. I have read all of the classics. Marusek clearly revives the genre with his excellent Counting Heads. Read more

Published on July 21, 2006 by A. S. Krantz

› See all 30 customer reviews...

.jsOffDisplayBlock { display: block; } .jsOffDisplayInline { display: inline; } .jsOffVisibility { visibility: visible; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayNoneBlock { display: block; } .jsOnDisplayNoneInline { display: inline; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; } .jsOnDisplayBlock { display: none; } .jsOnDisplayInline { display: none; } .jsOnVisibility { visibility: hidden; }

Customer Discussions

Beta (What's this?)

New! See all customer communities, and bookmark your communities to keep track of them.

This product's forum (0 discussions)

	Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
	No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight

Start a new discussion

Topic:

First post:

Receive e-mail when new posts are made

Prompts for sign-in

[Cancel]

Guidelines

Active discussions in related forums

Discussion	Replies	Latest Post
science fiction Have You Written A Sci-Fi Book - Display Case	85	1 hour ago
science fiction SyFy - TV presentation for morons	33	1 hour ago
watches Awful Invicta 'Service'	89	3 hours ago
science fiction Zero gravity isn't utilized in movies much.	53	5 hours ago
fiction Have You Written a Nonfiction Book - Tell Us About It	54	20 hours ago
fiction Have you written a book - tell us about it	817	23 hours ago
watches Raymond Weil watches	1	1 day ago