Counting Heads / David Marusek

I really liked this book. It has some flaws, but it’s a pretty good story. This is the story that I wanted Infoquake to be. It’s an S.F. thriller built on business and political rivalries. In the future, there’s a lot of nano-technology and bio-technology. There’s a human-computer interface that can work between people and computers. Nano can make almost anything, provided the right elements are provided. People can be age-reverted. Cloning is common. Space travel is common, though there isn’t such thing as faster-than-light travel. All of folks basic needs are pretty much met. The book begins the second section with a scheme to colonize other star systems through multi-century voyages. The conflict comes when someone wants to repurpose the colonization ships for something else. However, the jacket copy really doesn’t reflect what the content of the book is:

The Boutique Economy has made redundant 99 percent of the world’s fifteen billion human inhabitants. The world would be a much better place if they all simply went away. And conditions on Earth are about to get a lot worse.

That makes it seem like an evil megalomaniacal entity is going to wipe everyone out just because people are inconvenient. Boring… That’s not what the book is about! Glad I didn’t read the jacket copy first.

The real plot revolves around the human colonization project. Some of the people in charge figure they can make more money just by making these into habitats and selling the space. It doesn’t help that the person in charge of the project, Eleanor Starke, has made a lot of enemies and is not well-liked. So the bad guys stage a palace coup. Well, it’s more than a palace coup. They sabotage Ms. Starke’s spaceship as it’s re-entering the atmosphere, and it crashes in a fireball in South America. A couple of people and A.I.s are still in favor of the original project, and they fight to keep it heading to the stars. The plotters failed in one detail though. Someone may have survived the crash. And if it’s Eleanor Starke or her daughter Ellen Starke, the good guys could retain control. So it’s a rush to the crash site to find the survivors. Remember, it’s a Star Trek medical world. Even if just a head can be found in time, an entire body can be regrown for the survivor.

The first section of the book is actually a version of Marusek’s short story, We Were Out Of Our Minds With Joy, that details the romance and marriage of Eleanor Starke and Samson Harger about 40 years before the start of the main plot. That short story revolves around the first attempt to take Starke down, which is done through tagging Harger as being infested with enemy/terrorist nano-technology. As a result, Harger is seared for life. Nano monitors his body at all times in case terrorist nano-technology infests him. Any cells that disconnect from his body are burned away by the nano as a precaution. As a result, he is hotter than normal. His spit burns. Sex is impossible. And he stinks to high hell. It was an awesome story, because it engaged the reader with the sense of outrage we have when someone gets railroaded, and where the result is a very ugly thing. When the plot that takes the main part of the book begins in section 2, Harger takes a starring role. He was the first known stinker or seared person, and the last surviving one. The public outcry has forced the government to find more humane methods of dealing with enemies (though Harger was never a legitimate enemy).

The novel doesn’t work quite as well as the short story. There are a few sub-plots that could just be dropped. I didn’t care about them and they didn’t contribute to the overall story. They don’t go anywhere. And it seemed like the build-up to the climax came way too early and it was hard for me as a reader to feel that high tension throughout the book. It built up again at the end before the climax, but it lost the page-turner quality in the middle somewhat. But overall I really liked the book.

It was also a great vision of what a cyber-punk style future could be like that wasn’t just all fake virtual living. Which is a problem I’ve found with syber-punk; I often just feel no sense of danger or tension, because my reaction is Disconnect from the net, stupid. In this version, people don’t go into the net, the net is projected out into the real world. Sometimes as holograms (I love the vision of what television has become) and sometimes physically through robots big and small, nano-technology, and A.I. It’s cyber-punk done right, for once.

And yes, I do realize I seem to have some sort of thing about Infoquake. I keep mentioning it and there are more mentions to come too. All this mind space for a book I didn’t like all that much. Edelman must have done something right for me to keep focusing on it.