Counting Heads
I should come clean, but I didn’t read the whole book. The first section shows a love story in the future and then we jump 40 years into the future. In the beginning section, a young (relatively young since it’s easy to rejuvenate in the future) artist falls in love with a cougar female politician. There is courting, a fight, a break up and ultimatley true love wins out and they get married. Then the story gets stupid.
Our female politician gets nominated for a higher level. Since there are no openings on Earth, it’s assumed she’ll be off-planet somewhere. Then, just as she’s being confirmed, an Earth politician dies mysteriously and our heroine now has an opening on Earth. Then our artist gets killed and brought back. But the whole plot at this point is confusing and what is understandable is stupid.
A public “slug” sniffs his DNA and determines that he not only has a bad DNA virus (NASTIE), but is also two other people (and not himself). As the government tries to keep him from affecting other people, so they fill him full of scanners to determine what the problem is, but can’t replicate the slug’s results. But, while he was full of scanners, he is declared dead. Since he is marked dead, then every account linked to him is marked dead and the child he and his wife are growing has to be radically altered to remove his genes. Did I mention that this all takes place in 20 minutes?
There is no logic behind that whole scenario. If a automated search says you might be sick then you should be checked, if it says you are sick and two other people, then obviously something is wrong with the scanner. But the government doesn’t want to admit anything is wrong with the scanners. So they let him live, but he is marked dead. And they do something (technobabble) to his cells so that he can never be rejuvenated again. It’s never clear what that is supposed to do or why it’s needed.
Then we jump 40 years into the future and more people start dying and a cryogenically frozen head is lost. At this point I lost interest. There was too much stupidity and not enough characterization to make me care about these characters enough to keep reading. Save your money.
Hi there.
I got annoyed with this book, too, but I battled to the end because it had been highly recommended to me by a friend.
I took that slug scene to be an underhanded political move by someone either supporting or challenging his wife’s career progress. Towards the end of the book he tries to make a public statement about these kinds of ‘mistakes’.
But you’re absolutely right about the characterisation. I’ve just been reading a few online reviews of this book and they’re all raving about it, and, to be honest, when I read these reviews I was reminded of just how many amazing things Marusek has built into this world. It is truly quite imaginative. But with not enough ‘meat’ on these characters, it was hard to appreciate the great aspects of the book. Even with a future world with whatever technological adjustments we can make to our bodies, we’re still going to be humans with human needs, so the characters should still be interesting!
Good on you for quitting the book!