Counting Heads [Paperback]

It is a rather dull puzzle trying to comprehend why the glowing recommendations on the dust jacket fail to bear any resemblance to the contents of this novel. I managed to read to around the halfway point before skipping through to the end; something I almost never do and only because I was still struggling to find answers, any answers, as to why the quoted reviewers found this story appealing. The author favours short, flat sentences, a technique he is not a skilled enough writer to pull off. The result is a mere sketch, both of the characters and the world they inhabit and not a very well drawn one at that. The plot, which is summarised in a more exciting fashion on the back of the book than within, is a lukewarm mix of ideas that have been better executed elsewhere. The weak ending, left it seems with the intention of a sequel, is the final insult to the reader who has given over their time to wading through this. I had high hopes for this debut; being charitable perhaps this is his 'The Big U' and we'll see better work from him in the years to come.

This novel crafts such a fascinating future that it was immensely disappointing how bad the story was.

To his credit, Marusek has crafted one of the most interesting- and the most believable- future worlds to date. It is described in intricate detail, and definitely feels like a plausible future. It would have made such a good setting for a story as well. Unfortunately he simply fails to deliver there.

The start of the book is, to my understanding, an almost verbatim copy of a novella written a few years previously. It explains the backstory for the rest of the novel, and is probably the best part of it. Unfortunately, after it finishes, the plot derails completely.

There are two serious flaws in the storyline for the remaining two thirds of the book. The first is that there are simply too many subplots, minor characters, and so forth- that don't contribute to the story in any way. Most of them could have been removed entirely without impacting the plotline at all. Half the time the reader is left wondering "how does this guy fit in to the rest of it", but this is never answered. Most of these subplots also just peter out and are left unresolved.

The other problem is that the "main" story arc set up in the first part of the book (and for that matter, the one described in the blurb) is actually a *minor* subplot later on. In particular, the opening chapter explains how Samson Harger, the ostensible protagonist, got involved with Elanour Starke (whose semi-deceased daughter is supposed to the subject of the novel), and focuses entirely on him. The novel then fast-forwards a few decades, and Samson is barely mentioned again.

The other characters are also largely unsatisfying. Of the entire ensemble, only one of them is really worth mentioning: Fred is a "Russ" (a line of clones used for policing and security work) who is struggling with his identity and role in society. He's the only character who has any real personality and doesn't just serve as a vehicle to take us around the scene. He's also the closest thing we get to a protagonist, in that his story is one of the main ones in the book and he features in the ending.

One other gripe I have is that the blurb doesn't describe the book by any means. If one reads the blurb, it gives the impression that the story is about the search for Ellen Starke's frozen head. That plotline is there, but it's just one of many. The plot overall meanders around, and the missing head doesn't really feature that much until the end. The ending has been described by others as something of a "B movie chase scene", which fits it quite well.

So yeah, a major disappointment and a wasted setting. There's probably enough material in here for 10 short stories (and it would probably have worked quite well as 10 short stories), but Marusek doesn't manage to turn any of them into a novel. He seems interested mainly in showing off the fantastic world he's created, but doesn't manage to write a story to tie it together.

I'm bit late to this one - Marusek first came to my notice in a short story anthology with an inventive and thoughtful story. It piqued my interest, so here I am!

Counting Heads, Marusek's debut novel, is a fantastic read. In some ways it's straightforward enough, if follows the fortunes of one man and his family through several decades (though, to be clear, it leaps - overall there is a broad sweep, but it's handled in a couple of denser "chunks.") Where it sets itself apart is how seriously David Marusek takes the job of writing SF. Not to say that the novel is po-faced, or anything like that. He's a good writer, there's a decent level of wit in this.

Instead, what I mean is that it's a proper, serious SF novel. It never shies away from the fact that it's SF; it has a lot of ideas in it and I'd guess that Marusek has read a lot of SF himself. He marries these sfnal themes with an excellent human drama, the characterisation in this is almost uniformly excellent. This can often, I think, be a weakness for a lot of ideas driven SF writers - that is to say that they are often not so good at producing characters who are anything other than mouthpieces for themselves.

The opening of the novel sees a famous artist, Samson Harker meet a woman on her way to great power. By the time that the novel starts, humanity has practical immortality. They can both look forward to a long, long life. This, naturally, means that what we would consider normal is discarded. It's unlikely that immortals would wish to spend the rest of their lives together, on a crowded planet producing children would have to be strictly regulated, so when they find themselves in position to produce offspring, it's not quite in the way that we'd consider normal. However, this would seem to imply - in some ways - almost utopian. Things aren't (of course!) quite so simple. It's set against the background of a terrorist attack which has led to intense paranoia about nano-weapons - which imposes surveillance on the population and leads to Sam Harker's downfall. He is "seared" a process which amongst other things separates him from his peers. He is now incapable of receiving the treatments he requires to stay young. So when the book moves into it's second and third parts, he is an old man.

Incidentally, the book does handle the "show, don't tell" thing quite well. It's clear that there has been some kind of attack in the past which has led, in part, to the kind of society that we see now, but this is only ever explained as well as it needs to be. Also, the society in which the book takes part is clearly complex, but even beyond this, it's obvious that the whole world is complex. There are hints that the future that we see here isn't *quite* so evenly distributed through the world as one would hope.

The "searing" (and there are quite a lot of new terms in the book, though some are obvious and made more so by context, "aff, "homcom" and so on) was part of an attack on the growing power of Eleanor Starke (Samson's wife). As the novel moves on, this is more pronounced. A crash leaves her and her daughter dead and severely disabled (only her head survives intact!) and the plot of the novel centres around a group of characters involved in its retrieval. If I were to criticise, I'd say that the ending does go a bit crash-bang-wallop, but it was fun getting there.

The confidence of Marusek is demonstrated, I think, in that there are many ideas that people would use to create a whole novel on their own (nano-tech, colony ships, AI). He instead chooses to focus on the human aspect of this (and that's including the integration of sentient machines, clones and immortality). Although the next book, (Mind Over Ship) is a sequel, so he may look at some of these in greater detail.

So; a recommended debut! Enjoy!