Books: Counting Heads

By Lisa Fary

When it comes to science fiction, it seems like we’re either going to wind up in a shiny utopia where no one has pockets or a grimy dystopia where machines are the enemy. With his novel Counting Heads, writer David Marusek writes of a future Earth that has room for both, depending on which socioeconomic class you fall into.

You see all the best, in spite of some annoyances like human reproduction bans and slugmechs that randomly sample DNA to make sure you are who you are. Otherwise, it’s great. People can honeymoon on the Moon. Go to meetings via realbody or holo, or even cast a proxy holo to do the meeting for you while you take a bath. Rejuvenation treatments are readily available, allowing humans to live for centuries, at any age they choose. PDAs have advanced to interactive valets and mentars that handle business and finances for you, and with a personality bud, can even keep you company.

After a short time, it becomes clear that it’s only the affluent who can afford to live this way. As would be normal, the whole world hasn’t prospered – only a few by comparison. Everyone else has the same struggles most of us still have, but under a different social order.

In the middle of this is Eleanor Starke, a power hungry, workaholic “aff”, and her husband, Samson Harger, an artist and designer. The main plot of Counting Heads is the effort to find and revive their daughter, Ellen (who is considered a crash survivor by virtue of her head being removed and frozen pre-crash).

The hunt for Ellen isn’t even the most interesting part. There is so much in this book that, even in the last thirty pages, there seemed to be no end, no possible resolution for anything in sight. Each of the overlapping storylines are compelling, but the real star of Counting Heads is Marusek’s vision of the future. Much of it seems a logical progression from where we currently stand in technology, business, and the workforce.

Some Counting Heads tidbits:

Rejuvenation can also include retroaging, adults reverse aging to childhood so that they’re adults in kids’ bodies.
Clones, the product of corporations, do most of the work, with specific lines of clones doing specific jobs. Jennies are nurses, Russes do security, Johns do grunt work, etc.
The rest of humanity are either affs or free range chartists. Being a free range chartists may get you individuality, but it doesn’t get you a job. Clones have most of those.
Deep space colonization is on the horizon – huge Oships developed by one of Eleanor Starke’s companies are preparing to launch on a 1000 year voyage to colonize new worlds.
As ever, corporate business interests rule the world.
Eleanor Starke. . . let’s just say I wouldn’t have been surprised to read that she’d had a hand in the Kennedy assassinations. That’s how driven and powerful she is in Counting Heads.

The only aspect of Counting Heads that didn’t sit right was the ending. The conflicts within the storylines were pretty much resolved for good or ill and life was moving on, but there was the satisfying feeling of knowing that this wasn’t over (and not just because I already had the sequel, Mind Over Ship, in the queue). I like that. In our real lives, we rarely move neatly from one conflict to the next. They overlap, generate mini-conflicts within conflicts and so on. Marusek captured that.

What bugged me was that it just stopped, kind of like a projector lamp melting the only copy of a brilliant old film. I even checked the book to see if any pages had been ripped out of the back. No. It just stopped, like sudden death overtime.

Counting Heads, while sprawling in its story, is 336 pages of pure, unadulterated, science fiction geekery. I love this book.

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Lisa Fary’s early exposure to classic Battlestar Galactica in 1979 is largely responsible for her lifelong interest in science fiction and her childhood ambition of being an intergalactic space cowgirl. She thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku.