David Marusek first came to my attention when I read his short story “We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy” in one of the Dozois “Year’s Best” anthologies. It was a terrific story about a future America peopled with clones, AIs, and a variety of perfectly logical technological extrapolations of today’s world (like “militia slugs”– little autonomous biorobots that roam around taking DNA samples and looking for terrorists and other scofflaws). The story packed a wicked emotional punch, and Marusek’s characters are among the most vividly imagined I’ve ever encountered in SF.
I was a little nervous when I started reading Counting Heads— could Marusek sustain the emotional intensity and character strength of his shorter stories? Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. He does so, and more. Counting Heads begins with a modified version of the events in “We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy”, in which a young newly married couple gets a permit to have a baby (in a very unusual way, it must be said) just before disaster strikes their marriage. The remainder of the novel combines an ensemble cast of characters, including a cop who happens to be a clone, a 29-year-old who’s decided to remain at a biological age of 11, a whole passel of AIs, and the original husband and wife– whose daughter’s head, severed and cryogenically preserved in a spacecraft crash, forms the titular head that’s being counted, or (more accurately) hunted. The evolution of the various characters rings true and adds a nicely nuanced emotional depth to the action and gadgetry.
This New York Times book review dismisses it as a typical sci-fi geek book. Perhaps that’s why I liked it so much. It’s true that the ending is overly abrupt– almost as though the book were arbitrarily cut in half, although the author says that’s not the case– but apart from that, if I could only recommend one science fiction book this year, Counting Heads would be it– it’s that good.
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