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} }) </script> </div> </form> </fieldset> <article class="entryArticle content STeditorial"> <header class="entryHeader icon-author"> <h1 class="entryTitle">Marusek, David </h1> </header><p class='tagLine'>Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.</p><div class="browsingBtns"> <span> <input class="button PNI previous" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?id=p&entry=marusek_david'" value="Prev" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI next" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/next.php?&entry=marusek_david'" value="Next" /> </span> <span> <input class="button PNI incoming" type="button" onclick="window.location.href='/incoming.php?entry=marusek_david'" value="About This Entry" title="What links to the entry; contributor initials explained; how to cite; other information" /> </span> <span><input class="button PNI" type="button" value="Checklist" onclick="window.location.hash='chklst'" ></span> <span><input class="button PNI" type="button" value="Alpha" onclick="window.location.href='/chron.php?id=marusek_david&abc'" ></span> <span><input class="button PNI" type="button" value="Chron" onclick="window.location.href='/chron.php?id=marusek_david'" ></span> <span style="cursor: pointer;" onclick="window.open('/gallery.php?link=marusek_david');"> <img alt="Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com" style="margin: 0; position: relative; top:-2px;" src="/images/icon-gal.gif"></img></span> </div><p style='float:right; margin-bottom:0; margin-left:10px; position: relative; top: 3px;'> <a href='/gallery.php?id=Marusek-KnowYou.jpg' target='_blank'> <img src='https://x.sf-encyclopedia.com/gal/thumbs/Marusek-KnowYou.jpg' alt='pic'></a></p> <p>(1951-    ) US author who began to publish work of genre interest with "The Earth Is on the Mend" in <a href="/entry/asimovs">Asimov's</a> for May 1993, and who quickly established a reputation for the creation of <a href="/entry/near_future">Near Future</a> visions of Earth of nearly unparalleled complexity. Although he comes close at time to expounding a case for the kind of <a href="/entry/technology">Technological</a> fixes favoured by <a href="/entry/hard_sf">Hard SF</a> writers, the exhilaratedness of his work does not depend on a sense that the problems and dilemmas the future offers us are necessarily curable. There is also a powerful sense that – whether or not the human species survives the ordeals it must face over the next half century or so – the experience of exploring the nature of the days to come will in itself be enormously exciting. Although Marusek is prolific with ideas, however, he has not in fact written a large number of stories, most of them fitting comfortably into one compact volume, <i>Getting to Know You</i> (coll <b>2007</b>), which includes his best-known tale, "The Wedding Album" (June 1999 <a href="/entry/asimovs">Asimov's</a>), winner of a <a href="/entry/locus_award">Locus Award</a> for best novella and the <a href="/entry/theodore_sturgeon_memorial_award">Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award</a>. The story movingly dramatizes a central crux or problematic in Marusek's depiction of the world to come: an intimately conveyed and at times terrifying sense of the thinness of the partitions separating true citizens of the world – those whose <a href="/entry/identity">Identities</a> are properly integrated into a surveillance-based governance whose equilibrium depends on constant scrutiny of its components – from those cast into terrible isolation when that scrutiny is punitively abandoned (see <a href="/entry/crime_and_punishment">Crime and Punishment</a>; <a href="/entry/paranoia">Paranoia</a>). To be isolated in Marusek's universe is to inhabit a kind of <a href="/entry/pocket_universe">Pocket Universe</a>, claustrophobic and windowless; such a sensation permeates "Wedding", whose central revelation is that its protagonists are low-order simulacra, partial iterations or <a href="/entry/avatars">Avatars</a> of full humans, and that their task – when turned on – is to re-enact a wedding day again and again without apparent end (see <a href="/entry/time_loop">Time Loop</a>), while the real world changes beyond their fixed ken.</p> <p>Marusek uses terms like "iterant" to describe the pullulating bestiary of <a href="/entry/clones">Cloned</a> humans, or other sentients with limited autonomy, who effectively function as serfs in the thrumming world-system depicted in his major work to date, the ongoing <b>Heads</b> sequence – two volumes to date, <i>Counting Heads</i> (<b>2005</b>) and <i>Mind Over Ship</i> (<b>2009</b>) – set about a century from now, in a world where <a href="/entry/climate_change">Climate Change</a> and <a href="/entry/overpopulation">Overpopulation</a> and <a href="/entry/pollution">Pollution</a> and various <a href="/entry/disaster">Disasters</a> intensify a sense that the planet is now so saturated with crisis that mere humans <i>cannot follow the plot</i>. Perhaps unsurprisingly in a maze of this complexity, the central storyline, in which a vast cast searches desperately for a severed head whose brain is still alive, is something of a <a href="/entry/mcguffin">McGuffin</a>; far more interesting is the fact that the entirety of the long search for the head, occupying well over 100,000 words of text, takes place within a single day, and that the events depicted only make sense if faster-than-human <a href="/entry/ai">AI</a>s are engaged in shaping them: though Marusek never addresses the possibility in as many words, <b>Heads</b> clearly depicts a world at the cusp of <a href="/entry/singularity">Singularity</a>. It is also during this single day (10 May 2134) that the Chicago Canopy (see <a href="/entry/keep">Keep</a>) is lifted, now that a viral Outrage has dissipated and the sky, after decades, can be seen above the towers. Meanwhile, on the sidelines, an ancient man, who had decades earlier been cast into total isolation through government "error", arranges his death (his irrevocable isolation, down to the molecular level, has barred him from the <a href="/entry/nanotechnology">Nanotechnology</a>-enabled <a href="/entry/immortality">Immortality</a> that full citizens enjoy). An intricate (though perhaps rather melodramatic) conspiracy – revolving around the use of <a href="/entry/generation_starships">Generation Starships</a> to give the human race a chance to survive elsewhere – begins to intensify. This plot somewhat congests the second volume of the sequence, and the whole awaits satisfactory resolution.</p> <p>A new series, the <b>Upon This Rock</b> sequence beginning with <i>First Contact</i> (<b>2017</b>), deals lingeringly with an Alaskan venue in the frame of a suspected <a href="/entry/first_contact">First Contact</a>, possibly an <a href="/entry/invasion">Invasion</a>, possibly a <a href="/entry/religion">Religious</a> summoning of the faithful to prepare for the imminent <a href="/entry/end_of_the_world">End of the World</a>. The first volume builds slowly, with a sense of consequences to come.</p> <p>Marusek is one of the relatively few contemporary sf writers who seems deeply responsive to the contemporary world; further work is awaited eagerly. [JC]</p> <p><b>see also:</b> <a href="/entry/genetic_engineering">Genetic Engineering</a>; <a href="/entry/virtual_reality">Virtual Reality</a>; <a href="/entry/women_in_sf">Women in SF</a>.</p> <h3 id="chklst">David Marusek</h3> <p><b>born</b> Buffalo, New York: 21 January 1951</p> <p><b>works</b></p> <p><input type="button" value="Alphabetical" class="button PNI" onclick="window.location.href='/chron.php?id=marusek_david&abc'"> <input type="button" value="Chronological" class="button PNI" onclick="window.location.href='/chron.php?id=marusek_david'"></p> <p><b>series</b></p> <p><b>Counting Heads</b></p> <ul class="x"> <li><em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Counting+Heads&field-author=Marusek+David" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Counting Heads</a></em> (New York: Tor, <b>2005</b>) [<b>Counting Heads</b>: hb/Chris <a href="/entry/moore_chris">Moore</a>]</li> <li><em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Mind+Over+Ship&field-author=Marusek+David" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Mind Over Ship</a></em> (New York: Tor, <b>2009</b>) [<b>Counting Heads</b>: hb/Chris <a href="/entry/moore_chris">Moore</a>]</li> </ul> <p><b>Upon This Rock</b></p> <ul class="x"> <li><em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Upon+This+Rock+Book+1+First+Contact&field-author=Marusek+David" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Upon This Rock: Book 1: First Contact</a></em> (Fairbanks, Alaska: A Stack of Firewood Press, <b>2017</b>) [<b>Upon This Rock</b>: pb/David Marusek]</li> <li><em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Glassing+the+Orgachine&field-author=Marusek+David" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Glassing the Orgachine</a></em> (Fairbanks, Alaska: A Stack of Firewood Press, <b>2019</b>) [<b>Upon This Rock</b>: pb/]</li> </ul> <p><b>individual titles</b></p> <ul class="x"> <li><em><a href="/sfeshop.php?field-keywords=Getting+to+Know+You&field-author=Marusek+David" class="link-amazon" target="_blank">Getting to Know You</a></em> (Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, <b>2007</b>) [coll: hb/Mark A Nelson]</li> </ul> <p><b>links</b></p> <ul class="x"> <li><a target="_blank" href="http://www.marusek.com/">David Marusek</a></li> <li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?564">Internet Speculative Fiction Database</a></li> <li><a target="_blank" href="https://sf-encyclopedia.com/gallery.php?link=marusek_david">Picture Gallery</a></li> </ul> <p><b>previous versions of this entry</b></p> <ul><li><a href='https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/marusek_david' target='_blank'>Internet Archive</a></li></ul><br /><br /></article></div> <div class="sideBarsWrapper"> <div class="sideBarsColsWrapper clearfix"> <div class="column sideBar12 clearfix"> <div class="columnForm"><aside id="blogFeed" class="widget"> <div class="content STeditorial clearfix"> <h2>Recently visited entries<span style="background:url(/images/thingSFE2.png) !important"></span></h2><ul style='width: 50%; 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