David Marusek, Counting Heads (Tor, 2005)
Counting Heads is David Marusek's first novel, and an expansion of an earlier short story. It is a riveting work of excitement, adventure and character. The story takes place about a century and a half from the present. Its plot threads are are many and tangled, and like the best science fiction, the full reality of this future world is revealed only bit by bit.
The device that drives the story is the apparent murder of Eleanor Starke and grave injury of her daughter Ellen, in the crash of their orbital shuttlecraft. Starke is about 200 years old, and one of the power brokers in the United Democracies. Her killing sets off a global power struggle, and much of the action centers around efforts by the Starke estate to ensure that the daughter survives and those by their rivals to ensure that she doesn't.
There's a lengthy prologue in which we see Eleanor fall in love with and marry one Samson Harger, a semi-retired graphic artist. And we see Sam get "seared," legally killed by ever-present little robots that guard society from destructive nano-technology. When Sam's and Eleanor's computerized legal representatives convince the authorities that they've made a mistake, Sam is revived but unable ever again to be implanted with all of the nano-machinery that effectively make humans in the 22nd Century immortal.
Eleanor's death coincides with a number of other developments and sub-plots, particularly the planned lifting of the protective nano-shielding dome from Greater Chicago, where most of the action takes place. The events put in motion by her death sweep up several other individuals, including Fred and Mary, a security guard-for-hire and his wife, an out-of-work caregiver. Both are clones, genetically engineered members of the working class, seemingly programmed to act and react in certain ways but capable of surprising others -- and themselves. Also caught up in the action is an extended family of non-cloned people, called a charter; the Kodiak Charter is struggling to make ends meet, surviving mainly on the pension of Samson, who is nearing death from old age.
It's an exciting, page-turning tale in Marusek's complex, but believable, world that incorporates elements of so-called cyberpunk, as well as more mainstream sci-fi. The affluent, immortal power-brokers resemble Niven's Struldbrugs, while characters such as Fred, Mary, Sam and "young" Bogdan Kodiak acquire depth and personality. The virtual constructs called mentars also seem to have personalities of their own, rather like those in Heinlein's later books. Not least, the tale has resonance in today's world, in which faceless terrorists and security-driven bureaucrats sometimes seem equally threatening to life and liberty. It's also a world in which the outrageously wealthy are shielded from any and all hardship, clones do all the dirty work, and everybody else is left to sink or swim by his or her own wits in a dog-eat-dog micro-market-driven economy. Bogdan is 29 years old but frozen at age nine, and makes a living as the subject of highly invasive demographic research; another Kodiak, Kitty, is frozen in early adolescence and earns a few credits a day busking as a bizarre ballerina simulacrum in a public park. We glimpse others who do battle with machetes and charge others to watch, and ballrooms full of couples dancing, each couple to its own different internal music, waltzes and foxtrots and salsa and dozens of others, trying not to bump into each other. It's a sobering picture of where we may be headed.
