Frederik Pohl once said, “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” David Marusek has taken this to heart with COUNTING HEADS, an incredible extrapolation of the future of human community and the joys and troubles that come with it.
The biggest fault with COUNTING HEADS is not the novel itself, but its billing. While the dust jacket sells the book as an adventure story, it’s really a throwback to the great social explorations of Robert Silverberg and Pohl, not a dystopian thriller in the vein of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson. The year is 2134, and once again, man’s technological sophistication has not jumped past the basest aspects of human nature. The effective leader of the developed world has been assassinated, and her former husband and his new family, a handful of clones, an outcast monk and an artificial intelligence must untangle a dense conspiracy to save her only daughter.
While this might be the plot in a nutshell, it isn’t the bulk of the book, really. COUNTING HEADS is not defined by its plot so much as by the time and themes it explores and the prose itself, which is elegant and sharp. Marusek has created a future world (Chicago especially) that is intricate, imaginative and dense with great ideas and inventions. As the world has evolved, so have the concepts of individuality, community and family, and the characters struggle against these definitions in an utterly believable, utterly human fashion, even if they happen to be, by definition, other than human. The setting is so well-realized that it could support a panoply of stories and characters, and COUNTING HEADS hints at backstories at every turn, making the background as engrossing as the narrative.
Eventually, the protagonists must struggle: vs. man, machine, society, nature and themselves. If they didn’t do something that defined their lives, it wouldn’t be a novel, I guess. But this struggle, while interesting, seems secondary to the fascinating world and beautifully tragic lives being lived in tomorrow’s Chicago. The future might not be all its cracked up to be, but it’s great to visit, if only to look around for awhile. David Marusek’s Earth in COUNTING HEADS is a great way to do just that if you’re not planning to live for 130 more years.
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Great review, I’m off to Amazon to check it out, thank you.