Counting Heads

David Marusek's debut imagines 2134 with remarkable specificity: a Boutique Economy made possible by total automation, fifteen billion people, centuries-long lifespans, and 99 percent of humanity economically redundant. When corporate matriarch Eleanor K. Starke is assassinated and her daughter's cryonically preserved head goes missing, an unlikely group of clones and outcasts has to act. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review; the New York Times named it among the year's best; F&SF compared it favorably to Neuromancer. It is brilliant world-building and prescient on automation, identity, and AI. The caveat is real — this is dense, demanding fiction that requires patience to orient yourself in, and some reviewers found the back-half plotting uneven. For committed science fiction readers who want ambition and ideas, it delivers.