Getting To Know You: Stories

It might seem presumptuous to claim that the astonishing David Marusek has one heart. But if his work does actually boil down to a single creative thrust, I think I may have found a single sentence that says outright what Counting Heads (2005) says in multiplex over its 200,000 words of prologue to the New World. Maybe the sentence means something in particular to Marusek, too, as it is closes the last and most recent story assembled in Getting to Know You, a book which has been very carefully put together. "My Morning Glory" (2006)—a slingshot vignette told in the Slick-SF style of the 1960s Galaxy, a style Marusek habitually homages in the process of overloading it—describes the morning routines of an urban middle executive who lives alone, in an Apartment in (presumably) a vast conapt.

The Mind of the Apartment manifests in the form of various subroutines, some of them voice-only, some of them embedded in dedicated bondieuserie. My Morning Glory awakens the owner; My Kudo Kounter racks up praises bestowed upon him by the other exhalations of the central nutrient Mind, while My Frown Jar (which is in fact a jar) fines him for frowning; My Kitchen feeds him; though an evaluation meeting (it is called My Annual Evaluation) at his firm, which he must attend in the flesh, terrifies him, My Morning Glory bucks him up by reminding him that before the meetin he'll be able to have My Morning Coffee Break. All he has to do is get that far into the day, and the rest will be plain sailing. "Now get out of here," says My Morning Glory, says the Mind of the conapt our protagonist surely does not own,

and show them what you're made of."
The moment I step across the threshold, the door slams and bolts behind me. I life My Filter Mask to wie my eyes. Then I straighten up and march resolutely into My Future.
Thank you, My Morning Glory.
I'd be lost without you.

End of story. End of book. The single thing Marusek is saying here can take a lot of words to paraphrase, though I'm inclined to understand him to say something utterly simple, however complex to work out and unendurable for oldsters to live through as we function-creep deeper into a century he clearly knows better than he knew us. The simple thing he says he also says in the title of the collection. What he says is: I am lost unless I am known.

Falling off the map

It is, however, a two-edged sword to be known. I am lost unless I am known, certainly. But Marusek says more than that; he says it is no longer possible simply to be lost, or to lose oneself (every single inhabitant of North America, in Marusek's vision of the distant near future, has been found, though not everyone is exactly kept). What happens to us in 2008 is not that we become lost, that we fall off the map, but that we are made invisible, that when the map refuses to recognize us we become impermissible. It's even worse than that. What Marusek has created—in terms which make it clear how coddlingly the writers dear to Analog have applied their beloved Social Darwinism to the winner guys they so love to make up—is a world in which we are invisible unless we pay. Robert A. Heinlein may have known how to argue privatized air; he did not really know how to Disappear the indigent. Marusek says we will soon find out how to.

In a review of Counting Heads, I said something about how he goes about operating his view of the world: that if there were one term that might pinpoint his understanding of how an information-shaped world might work, that word would be something like scrutiny. In the dense Mutabilitie cantos of Marusek's world, to be known means to be scrutinized. (The melodramatic Disappearing of the protagonist of Counting Heads turns on a failure of scrutiny, and upon a profound sense that the disassembly of a human being into a state of invisibility is inherently unreversable.) The narrator of "My Morning Glory" lives utterly within the baptismal multigaze of a hive of knowing. This circumambient hive, in almost all Marusek's stories, can be "reduced" to some form of controlling Mind—or mentor, or Mentat, or proxy, or belt valet, or "interface persona," or any of a dozen other descriptors Marusek uses to costume the shapes-of-information who bestride the data flows at the heart of his world, shapes who or which are here usually enstoried (here but not in Counting Heads) as fragilely obedient to the human beings whose inner substance they transcribe, so that these humans who "own" them may know the world and be known by the world.

The tales in Getting to Know You which share a common background with Counting Heads are set prior to the full novel. In these stories, the Minds (in the later text they are the only shapes-of-information capable of understanding the story of things) are comparatively primitive. They are half maps—"Getting to Know You" (1997) follows the learning curve of one of these entities as it burrows deeper and deeper into the topological thingness of its new human owner—and half Tonto; they have not yet taken up the reigns of data. They are a bee dance humans can still almost supervise.

One of the best SF stories ever written

A problem with Getting to Know You may be the fact that a quarter of the book is given over to his second-best-known tale, "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy" (1995), and even though it is wisely placed in the very center of the volume, where it can be entered at speed, readers of Counting Heads (like myself) may find this earlier version of its first extended section (its main focus is the tragedy of failed scrutiny I referred to a moment ago) a bit difficult to sort. It may be interesting compare both versions, and to be able to trace the depth and precision and unfailing rightness of Marusek's revisions to his telling (he is notorious for reworking his stories; it is very good to see how thoroughly the result justifies what could be an obsessive punctilio). But that is not normally what readers are looking for in a collection of stories; nor perhaps should they be asked to at such length. More than this jarring of versions, however, to read the first iteration of "Out of Our Minds" is to remind ourselves how much more complexly Marusek had come to conceive the future after 10 years of working on his overall project. "Out of Our Minds" did not seem a draft in 1995. It does now.

Nothing in Getting To Know You does more than hint at the furioso rampancy of a world—one fears it is surely a version of ours to come—that Marusek is now hovering on the crux of making his. The best thing to do may be to cherry-pick. It is good to become reacquainted, not for the first time perhaps, with Marusek's single most famous tale, "The Wedding Album" (1999), in which animate simulacra representative of significant moments are cast off by the humans they mime; the simulacra are reiterations of story embedded in something like flesh, in a manner remotely evocative of the godgame ambience of most pocket universe tales, and specifically evocative of the fate of Rush that Speaks in John Crowley's Engine Summer (1979). It is one of the best SF stories ever written. It starts Getting to Know You off. The taste of it stings the tongue as you proceed through some lesser—though severely and consummately crafted—material.

"The Earth is On the Mend" (1993) is a brilliant tiny fable. It—not "My Morning Glory," contrary to Marusek's not entirely serious author's note—may be the only story published here with anything like a genuine load-bearing happy ending. "Cabbages and Kale or: How We Downsized North America" (1999) lays down more precursive riffs on the world on Counting Heads (I think it is fair to interject references to Marusek's novel all through this review, because it is clear he was writing and rewriting the book through almost the whole extent of his career before 2005), but also strikes a warning note, at least for this reviewer. Like hard-SF writers in general, Marusek has a sweet tooth for enablement, and there are points in "Cabbages and Kale" when he seems to like his garrulous and agile Vice President maybe a little more than it is easily possible for his readers to. Marusek's winners tend to burn a bit bright. Like most hard-SF winners, they can hurt the eye.

In the end, there is perhaps something too visibly didactic about some of his embodiments of the lessons he so attractively wishes to impart: that we are born naked; that life after birth is all about gaining, defending, losing the data-sigils that validate us. In the end, he may occasionally protest too much that the utter solitude of his favored protagonists, within a swarming of scrutiny, is a cost we too will have to bear. But that is exactly what he does manage to tell us. Wake up, he says, nail your sigil to the world. If you are not to be utterly lost in the world, he says, you must be found.