June 24March 23Matt Denault

Getting to Know You is only David Marusek’s second book, but he is already a veteran of the science fiction wars. Marusek’s 2005 novel Counting Heads was the subject of the debut speculative fiction column “Across the Universe” in that bastion of mainstream fiction, The New York Times Book Review; the column both proclaimed Counting Heads to be among the reviewer’s “favorite books [of 2005] in any category” and yet wondered, “why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky” that it becomes inaccessible to readers of mainstream literature? The question helped renew a battle, waged within the science fiction community since the New Wave movement of the 1960s, over how the “science” and “fiction” components of SF intersect. Some (such as Charles Stross) argued that SF should be more geeky, should focus its efforts on the tech-savvy readers of websites like Slashdot and Boing Boing; others (including John Scalzi) argued that what SF requires are more accessible entry points for readers less familiar with science. Sadly, the first point of the NYT column — regarding the quality of Marusek’s fiction — was largely forgotten in the discussion. Given all this, I’m happy to say that Getting to Know You, a new collection of the author’s short stories, in large part bridges the gaps that its predecessor highlighted: it’s equally accessible to SF genrephiles and mainstream readers. The collection’s defining characteristic is carefully constructed balance.

The “carefully constructed” qualifier is an important one; the balance Marusek achieves in Getting to Know You is based on variety and focus, not a dull sameness. Of the ten stories in the collection (initially published between 1993 and 2003, largely in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine), five strongly evoke distinct, singular emotions; these stories are quite separate and range from the present day to some unspecified far future. The remaining five stories occur in the same near-future universe as Counting Heads and are deeply multifaceted, ambiguous works. These stories present a future history of North America from 2033 to approximately 2600. Nanotech and biotech, along with cloning, artificial intelligence, wearable ubiquitous computing, human augmentation and environmental terrorism — all are explored, along with their implications for politics, economics, lifestyles and more. It never gets overwhelming, though, because Marusek doles out progress slowly: each story focuses on just a few advances and implications. Moreover each story is grounded by one or two intensely human characters.

Indeed, the “Counting Heads stories” in Getting to Know You illustrate how Marusek’s characterization naturally balances competing literary worldviews. Characterization in genre science fiction is largely predicated on ideas of intention, change and growth; mainstream literary fiction in contrast is often centered around the foolish consistency of people and the borders that constrain their growth. Getting to Know You offers up a third model of what is so often called “the human condition” (and rather vacuously left at that). Marusek uses technology to show that while the outward appearance of people may be consistent and monolithic, inside there is a swirling of ideas and beliefs tightly linked to current circumstances. That swirl is rarely glimpsed because once we are convinced of our beliefs, we rarely reconsider them. If we could examine a person’s mind in frozen instants of time, however, we — and they — might be surprised at the variance of their thoughts from one moment to the next, and what the logical extensions of those thoughts might be.

So for example Vice President Saul Jaspersen, in “Cabbages and Kale or How We Downsized North America,” begins to realize how little he knows himself when confronted by a “proxy” of himself — a holographic copy of both physical features and inner mental state. When asked his opinion of a Procreation Ban that will limit the right to have children to select licensed citizens,