Kirjahaku

Counting Heads is David Marusek's extraordinary launch as an SF novelist: The year is 2134, and the Information Age has given rise to the Boutique Economy in which mass production and mass consumption are rendered obsolete. Life extension therapies have increased the human lifespan by centuries. Loyal mentars (artificial intelligences) and robots do most of society's work. The Boutique Economy has made redundant ninety-nine percent of the world's fifteen billion human inhabitants. The world would be a much better place if they all simply went away. Eleanor K. Starke, one of the world's leading citizens is assassinated, and her daughter, Ellen, is mortally wounded. Only Ellen, the heir to her mother's financial empire, is capable of saving Earth from complete domination plotted by the cynical, selfish, immortal rich, that is if she survives. Her cryonically frozen head is in the hands of her family's enemies. A ragtag ensemble of unlikely heroes join forces to rescue Ellen's head, all for their own purposes. Counting Heads arrives as a science fiction novel like a bolt of electricity, galvanizing readers with an entirely new vision of the future.

"David Marusek is one of the best-kept secrets of science fiction, a wild talent with a Gibson-grade imagination and marvelous prose, and a keen sense of human drama that makes it all go"--Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother The year is 2135, and the international program to seed the galaxy with human colonies has stalled as greedy, immoral powerbrokers park their starships in Earth's orbit and begin to convert them into space condos. Ellen Starke's head, rescued from the fiery crash that killed her mother, struggles to regrow a new body in time to restore her dead mother's financial empire. And Pre-Singularity AIs conspire to join the human race just as human clones, such as Mary Skarland and her sisters, want nothing more than to leave it. Welcome to Mind Over Ship, the sequel to Marusek's stunning debut novel, Counting Heads, which Publishers Weekly called "ferociously smart, simultaneously horrific and funny."

The celestial visitor must quickly find a new human host to assist in its rescue plans. It reveals itself to park ranger Jace Kuliak as a stock Hollywood space alien and pleads with him to help it "phone home." By now, the "War in Heaven" has spilled over into our solar system, and Jace must bear the burden of deciding the fate of humanity.

Despite the alien's best efforts, the so-called Little Nudge has failed, and the rogue planet Pipnonia is once again on a collision course with Earth. It's time for the "Big Bump," the alien's last-ditch effort to save Earth and its inhabitants from total annihilation. But first it pressures Ranger Jace Kuliak to accompany Deut Prophecy, the Thirteenth Apostle, on her mission to Pipnonia to preach to its doomed population.Meanwhile, civil society is disintegrating around the world. Vera Tetlin, the popular governor of Alaska, and her family are on the run from agents of the Antichrist. And Doomsday Preppers from the Lower 48 are seeking refuge in the little ghost town of McHardy, Alaska. Among them is a petty tyrant and racist who wants the town for himself.Things are heating up - literally.

The Prophecy family has demolished the entrance to their End Times mountain keep with explosives in order to isolate themselves from Governor Tetlin's army of Doomsday preppers. But the army has other things on its mind - The rogue planet Pipnonia, which is on a collision course with Earth, is being torn apart by cosmic forces in the sky overhead.Deuteronomy Prophecy, outside the mountain keep and abandoned by her family, enlists the help of Ranger Kuliak in a last-ditch effort to rescue her youngest brothers and sisters via a narrow ventilation shaft. But even if they succeed, where can they find shelter when the sky is literally falling on their heads?