That's Plenty

Counting Heads is by some guy named David Marusek. I guess this is Mr. Marusek's first full length novel, though the first part of the book is taken from a short story, and he cribs from at least another source (The Wedding Album) to pad out the book, 330ish pages.

Part one, We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy is a fast and fastidious jaunt with one Samson Hagar, an artist. He used to paint, but has went on to create nano gift wraps, from orange peels, to human flesh that bleeds when you cut it open. Both have navels. His current celebrity stock is now under a penny (Bowie is the future (1997)) Anyways, artist boy meets rising star politician girl. Sci-fi wise, they are at the dawn of nanotech, humans can live forever, clones for specific jobs (nurse, hooker, body guard) are starting to rolled out, PDAs in your belts hunger for more neural paste, and you can holocast yrself anywhere on the globe, etc. Boy + Girl are kicking over 100 years old, get married, girl's political career blows up, they get a licsense to have a baby, something horrid happens to our Boy that costs him his immortality. End of part one. Already, 60 pages in I'm feeling Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House.

Now part two starts 40 years later and we are assualted with chapters, sametime POVs from clones, geriatric Sammy from part 1, a retro-boy who has been 13 for 16 years (and is afraid of pubes) and barly sentient alife in the form of bees and wasps (whose first appearance is its own chapter, at two slim paragraphs.) Now, I feel a lot of Gun With Occasional Music by Bennington's own very Associate degree alum Jonathan Letham and even more of Welcome to the Monkey House. I keep expecting someone to tell Sammy that he's such a foxy grandpa. The title comes into play as we share a most peculiar parachute jump with the daughter of Part 1's couple. Ah, screw it, this is published by goddamn TOR and it's on the bookflap. Counting Heads at one point, quite literally, refers to a severed head and cyrogenic hoohaw.

Still, the nanotech is a big part of the story, again reminding me of The Diamond Age and Gibson's second trilogy, the third book All Tomorrow's Partys in particular. But here is where Heads is really differant, it hits the postpostmodern jump point 60 pages in instead of a vague epilogue (which we still have here) or a furtive extended chapter. But more pages, more chapters, more words only flesh it out a tiny bit. The book is still driven by particular naunces of narrative, as the reader draws points together, but the finally climax again draws back to the Diamond Age, or any tech Stephenson novel, in that it doesn't qutie gel. However, I'd argue in this case, it's not the author's failed attempt at ending-writing, but a conscious goal. There's a lot of action, a lot of resolve, and no solution. Like human evolution, maybe?

The book keeps the pace into parts 2 and 3 (I never saw a reason to seperate 2 and 3 however) and Marusek has a pretty good talent at explaing the sciency/geeky parts through example and conjecture that fit into the plot (a little jarringly didactic at points, but not horrible) without turning a particular technology, clone type, or corporate mission statement into a digression.

With all the artificial life ("They wouldn't commit sentacide would they?") new new new new media art, nanotech, weapons, clones, etc, etc, my favorite bit of scifictioanry was Starkese, a meta-language, that allows a corporate familly to challenge each other through a parasitic language that hides in all their words, gestures and whatever else there is. It's the kind of small plot device that carries such a big payload, that you have to look at the very text your reading, and hope to see the emperor's new clothes in the text. Small throwaway sentences here, character building but antiplot chapters there, and generally offsetting clement poetic phrases point a perhaps the subtext of the book, human nature and its marraige with capitalism and technology.

The future doesn't look so dystopic (or the technology so utopic) as it does vagualy reasonable. Not a possible future, but an acceptable one. I also recently read Cloud Atlas which is a fucking brilliant book, that is about the minutia of human nature, and does feature a tech-futuristic setting for a 1/6th of the book, but there, all movies are 'disneys' and all drinks are 'starbuck', and there's more than a tiny pander to the reading audience of the 2000's with these reassigned proper nouns.

And what do I get, trying to read a metalanguage encoded in a book, about the future and frozen heads, holographic alife that appears as a caveman, and clones who are the most humane chacters? A settled sense of dread. Dread isn't the keyword; it's settled.

Dylan, you should read tis re: that class we had with Ruben. Something to do with comic books, right? This would make a good movie, too.