Couldn't read past the 1/3 mark...too many names, too many maddening acronyms, and a story that goes all over the place without fleshing out any of its characters. Great ideas hampered by so-so storytelling.

Counting Heads: missing head (Ellen), Charter member heads, off-beat Russ heads, dwindling Evangeline heads, mirror mentar heads, compromised mentar heads, Seared heads. It was a good book. ( )

One of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. It has quite a few compelling characters and ideas, and manages to capture it all in a slice of life narrative. ( )

I was caught by the premise and what can I say? I love hi-tech future-Earth stories, especially when they don't automatically deform into the dissolution of society, but rather, they discuss important issues in sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing, sometimes just plainly WTF.

This one is definitely all of the above.

The entire novel is extremely rich in wonderful world-building ideas in the grand, nearly overwhelming sense that it's all over the place, from nanotech everywhere, to domed cities to keep out the nasties (weaponized nanotech), AIs that haven't taken over the world, but instead cohabit with us, humans who have been augmented in both capacity and health that we're pretty much on the same playing field as the AIs, helpful clones everywhere, a grand colonizing expedition set up for a fairly distant star, and an interesting, not generic utopian society.

So where's the story?

Oh, of course things go wrong. In fact, tons of things go wrong for this large cast of characters, from complete disenfranchisement of all the joys this world has to offer, to losing one's head, to learning that the greatest adventure the world has to offer might be a con-job, to living in fear of the omnipresent surveillance.

This book, despite the very strong beginning and focus on poor Sam, isn't, unfortunately, about him. It's easy to get misled by the some of the hype. Instead, this is a book about all the people, and overpopulation, and the kinds of societies that we allow ourselves to create.

Of course, that's not to say that the characters aren't fascinating, even with such a large cast, because they are. But also don't expect a traditional thriller or plots that weave back together again in a grand fashion, because that's not what this novel is really about. Nor is it an easily defined and thematic novel, either.

Instead, it is an extremely rich exploration of imagination and life, full of loss, duty, loneliness, joy, and especially of hope, mostly transcending the base cares and proving that no matter how advanced we become, or how we might eradicate disease or old age, we're still human, for good or ill. And I'm not leaving out the clones.

Hell, even the AIs are only human.

Don't let me mislead you, though, because there's plenty of action and adventure here, too, as well as creepy images of slugs everywhere and babies with adult heads, but there's also some totally wonderful allusions mixed in with some extremely clever prose, too. And in any account, no one should ever discount extremely crisp writing.

If you're looking for futuristic SF in the vein of [b:Stand on Zanzibar|41069|Stand on Zanzibar|John Brunner|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1360613921s/41069.jpg|2184253] or [b:Brave New World|5129|Brave New World|Aldous Huxley|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1433092908s/5129.jpg|3204877], that focuses more on what the world of the future has to say, with lots of extras that paint as interesting a picture as the MCs, then you really can't go wrong with this gem of a novel. ( )

“I am not pouting, and I am certainly not indulging in self-pity, as Eleanor accuses me. In fact, I am brooding. It is what artists do, we brood. To other, more active people, we appear selfish, obsessive, even narcissistic, which is why we prefer to brood in private.”

In “Counting Heads” by David Marusek

SF stories often regurgitate medieval themes and settings, including wars, sword fighting, emperors, dukes, and so on. Star Wars and Dune do this, too. They would have us believe that people still fight with (light) sabres although they master FTL travel as well. Light sabres may be entertaining, but to me they are not serious SF. I prefer another kind of SF, the kind that shows NEW forms of human/alien behaviour induced by alien settings and new technology, NEW dilemmas and choices, and shows how current developments will play out in the not-too-distant future. In short, it kind of sheds light on the human condition as I’ve been writing “ad nauseam” on this blog. David's Marusek brilliant "Counting Heads" has no sword fighting, no laser guns. It does have court cases being pursued by Artificial Intelligence Assistance up to the Highest Court within milliseconds. People being "seared" - deprived of their online identity and thereby being unable to live a normal life. Societies with large numbers of clones such as "Maries" (that often marry Freds, who are fond of making lists for everything they do). Leftover Nano weapons from a past conflict still wreaking havoc. How drones will change the way life is lived. People choosing the age at which they remain living. A large queue forming outside the neighborhood 3D print shop because someone is printing a couch... Etcetera. And the book was written in 2005. This shows it’s not necessary to write 600-pages books to give us a fine SF novel. More words, not always give us a better book for sure; would a longer book serve to clarify, especially when the reader is forced to embrace and remember new names and terminologies at almost every paragraph? Do we really need to be spoon-fed? I much prefer my SF to be ultra-dense like Marusek's; he prefers to build the world through subtle hints for an attentive reader to pick up and put together. But we're geeks. We're smart guys. We wear hats. This is how we should want our books. We don't need our mommies to cut up our steak for us, so why do we need an author to spoon-feed us big chunks of exposition to explain every nuance? Were this another type of SF novel (meaning bigger), it’d degenerate to a sinkhole of flash-in-the-pan fantasy in the guise of science fiction.

My point: there is SF that retells old stories in new settings, and there is SF that throws most of the old out and replaces it with thought-provoking new stuff. The books from Philip K. Dick could only be made into movies at the end of his life, and decades thereafter, because that's when society had learned enough to understand his concepts. Maybe the same will happen to David Marusek.

SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )