Mind Over Ship: David Marusek's hyperfuturistic, hyperimaginative soap-opera
David Marusek's Mind Over Ship is the long-awaited sequel to his groundbreaking 2005 debut novel Counting Heads, and it was worth the wait.
Mind Over Ship returns to the awesomely weird and exciting Marusek future, where humanity trembles on the verge of transcendence, splintering into people, clones, avatars, AIs, temporary and permanent models (some made without the model-ee's consent) and a thousand other fragments. Each of these factions battles for the best deal it can get -- even as the individual members of each clade fight for their own personal best interests.
Mind Over Ship is so complex, with so many storylines and so many incredibly inventive premises, that it trembles on the verge of breakdown, acrobatically walking on a tightrope over the pit of too-weird. It's a book that demands and rewards attention, as it explores a hundred important philosophical questions about free will, destiny, bioethics, intelligence, and duty.
For example, there's the story of the betrayal of the cold-sleep deep-space ships, which are meant to be launching by the dozens to distant, unexplored stars (but which have been co-opted for use as space-condos in a hostile corporate takeover). This leaves their erstwhile owners -- semi-sovereign collectives of Jesus freaks, defective spare-organ clones of VIPs, fatalistic Ukrainian Chernorbyl survivors, and other disaffected groups yearning to breath the air of distant worlds -- out in the cold.
Then there's the biowar flu, "the 24-hour nonspecific grief flu," which causes its victims to feel, well, nonspecific grief for 24 hours, before their immune systems fight the bugs off. Or do they?
NASTIEs are nanoweapons, the scale of a dandelion seed, which take root and begin coopting nearby matter, sending out tree-like roots to seek out the raw materials to assemble themselves into "deadly weapons of mass destruction." The army that launched the NASTIEs disbanded sixty years ago, but the seeds still flutter on the wind, periodically dissolving whole housing complexes as cloned first-responders seek to disassemble them before they can realize their destiny.
Clones are in trouble -- different kinds of clones, provided by different workforce vendors, are all going through massive, wrenching existential trauma. Do they have "clone fatigue" that causes them to run against type? And of course, every clone wonders if his creators imbued him with "musts" (secret, tailored cocktails of trace minerals whose absence will kill a clone in short order) and "candy" (like "musts," except that these cocktails evince extreme ecstatic responses, acting as a powerful Skinnerian conditioning agent).
There's even weirder life in Mind Over Ship: a beheaded tycoon whose head is grafted onto a cloned baby's body; her mother, secretly alive, encoded in the modified brains of "panasonic" fish around the world. And then there's the lively media: nits and the nitwork, micro-, mezzo- and nano-scale spybots that form a ubiquitous surveillance grid around the planet, a grid that can only be avoided by taking powerful purgatives that destroy the artificial fauna populating your outer and inner self before passing through an airlock.
Marusek's hyperfuturistic, hyperimaginative soap-opera is a tour-de-force of imagination, philosophy, dark humor and humanity. Let's hope he writes the next one quickly!
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I loved his book "Counting Heads." I found it in the MIT SF Society Library. The namey name namies were nerve-racking.
Hmm, the "NASTIEs" concept is pretty interesting.
I loved Counting Heads. Best debut I've read in ages. Great story, and the themes made me think along the lines that it might be something like what PKD might produce if he had happened to have a second coming and got back to writing after catching up with the last couple of decades.
So, I'm onto this as soon as possible.
"soap-opera" or space opera?
At least two of the plot lines mentioned here, and I hope in homage, are attributable to earlier writers. Grief flu- ‘Worlds’, Haldeman. “Musts”- ‘Godwhale’, Bass.
For some reason this page doesn't show up on the archive page for 17 June. Nor does it show up under the 'book' archive. Drove me crazy trying to find it as I couldn't remember the author's name...
Has this post been "un-published" because of some personal disagreement? If it has, at least it's not breaking links by still be accessible as evidenced by google.
LIke #6, I can't see it in the archives or under the 'book' tag.
"Has this post been "un-published" because of some personal disagreement? "
Yeah, that's why you can view it here so you may comment on it.
Archives limiting to first n posts is a bug in our MT template. It's being fixed tomorrow.