The Fiction

The Saga is Complete

Counting Heads
So, your spouse is a clone, and your boss is immortal. NASTIES are eating Chicago, and there’s a baby in a drawer in Trenton with your name on it. Welcome to Counting Heads, an everyday tale about a man and his home planet—Earth. The first in a two-book series.

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.

Available in hardback, paperback, audio, Kindle, Nook, and other formats at your favorite online bookstore. Available in Russian, French and Romanian editions.

Mind Over Ship
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."

Available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, Nook, and other formats at your favorite online bookstore.

The Wedding Album
With wedding photos and videos and mementos of all kinds, newlyweds attempt to hold on to their special day and to cherish it forever. Someday technology may enable us to record not only our appearance and voices but everything we know, feel, fear, and love at the moment the shutter clicks. Then our wedding mementos, like Anne and Ben’s in this story, take on a life of their own in a world where love may be eternal, but the world is not. Till deletion do us part . . .

This novella won the Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction.

“It is one of the best SF stories ever written.” —John Clute, Sci fi Weekly

Available for Kindle and Nook at Marusek’s shop on Gumroad and at Amazon and B&N and as part of the collection Getting to Know You (See below). Also available in German in ebook and print editions.

Getting to Know You
Not since William Gibson and Bruce Sterling galvanized science fiction in the 1980s has the emergence of a new writer been heralded with such acclaim as that attending David Marusek, whose brilliant first novel, Counting Heads, appeared to rave reviews in 2005. But Marusek did not come out of nowhere. Aficionados of the genre had already taken note of his groundbreaking short fiction: masterfully written, profoundly thought-out examinations of futures so real they seemed virtually inevitable.

Now, in this collection of ten short stories, Marusek's fierce imagination and dazzling extrapolative gifts are on full display. Five of the stories, including the Sturgeon Award-winning "The Wedding Album," a shattering look at the unintended human consequences of advanced technology, are set in the same future as Counting Heads. All ten showcase Marusek's talent for literate, provocative science fiction of the very highest order.

Available in hardback, paperback, Kindle, Nook, and other formats at your favorite online bookstore. Also in a special German edition.

Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz
This short story first appeared in the January, 1999, issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

“The tale that really stood out for me though was ‘Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz’, a haunting yet compelling (and strangely logical) tale of Alzheimer’s, cryonic storage and the protecting of Yurek Rutz’s immortal soul. Having finished the tale of Yurek Rutz I was left in awe of how well everything fitted together and I found myself hoping that it all turned out well for Yurek Rutz. Once you finish the tale you’ll understand why I’ve mentioned Yurek Rutz’ name more than once, you may even end up slipping it into conversation yourself :o) The fact that a Yurek Rutz pops up again in the next story surely cannot be coincidence.” —Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review

Available for Kindle and Nook at Marusek’s shop at Gumroad and at Amazon and B&N.

My Morning Glory & other flashes of absurd science fiction
Here are three flash science fiction stories collected in one volume for the first time. (Flash fiction is the name given to ultra-short stories of 1000 words or less.) These stories were originally published by the British science journal Nature in their Futures series of original one-page sci-fi stories.

“My Morning Glory,” is a curious tale of a man and his apartment and the helpful entity that rules them both.

In “Timed Release,” good housekeeping was never so compelling.

“A Hard Man to Surprise” can be a hard man to please.

Available for Kindle and Nook at Marusek’s shop on Gumroad and at Amazon and B&N.

She Was Good—She Was Funny
This short story first appeared in Playboy magazine.

Walt Baffen, an Oxford-trained archeologist, is spending his first winter alone in a remote Alaskan log cabin. All goes well until the temperature drops to minus 40 and he receives a visit by an odd neighbor with a "bone to pick." What happens next goes way beyond chilling. Not since Jack London's "To Build a Fire" has a short story made a roaring fire seem so inviting.

Available for Kindle and Nook at Marusek’s shop on Gumroad and at Amazon and B&N.

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