Counting Heads
This is my first novel. I started work on it in January 1999, and finished in March 2003 (and then finished again in May 2004 and again in January 2005). It's scheduled for release in early November 2005. Quite a long haul. Along the way, I have issued several "Novel Updates" and sent them to a mailing list of fans and readers. If you would like to be placed on my Novel Update list, just contact me.
Here are links to the first few updates:
- Novel Update 1--January 2000 and November 2001
- Novel Update 2--December 2002
- Novel Update 3--A Sale!--January 2004
Synopsis
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 Characters
This is a character-driven story of love between two very exceptional people, a world leader and an artist. Part One of the novel is a slightly different version of my 1995 novella, "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" (see The Stories for more information). Here we are introduced to Samson Harger and his powerful wife, Eleanor Starke. They are two people who seem to have everything: wealth, fame, successful careers, and unlimited longevity. Unexpectedly, they are offered something more, something that only a few people in Western society are allowed to have--a baby.
The World
The year is 2092, and the living is easy.
The Information Age has given rise to the Boutique Economy in which mass production and mass consumption are rendered obsolete. Almost everything one needs—clothing, food, furniture, medicine, electronics, etc.—can be easily fabricated in the home with nanotech assemblers.
Life extension therapies have increased the human life-span by centuries.
Loyal mentars (artificial intelligence) and arbeitors (robots) do most of society’s work. What they can’t manage is performed by a contented labor force of human clones.
If this sounds like paradise, it is—but only so long as you continue to make your longevity payments. And that’s the problem. The Boutique Economy has made redundant ninety-nine percent of the world’s fifteen billion human inhabitants. It has retired not only the twin engines of mass production and consumption, but also the masses, themselves--the rivers of people once needed to fill mines, factories, farms, and shopping malls. All are superfluous and wasteful. Not to mention messy, fractious, and hungry. The world would be a much better place if they all simply went away.
Enter the “Garden Earth Project.”
A consortium of a dozen of the West’s most influential private citizens has engineered a brilliantly cynical scheme to improve the quality of life on Earth. In its simplest terms, their plan calls for trading title to land on Earth for settlement rights on an unnamed Earth-like planet in a neighboring star system. One acre of land here entitles one colonist to one thousand acres there, plus passage aboard a generational starship, all of the technology and supplies necessary to tame a new world, and an equal vote in the governance of both starship and colony. All this for one acre.
In its turn, the Garden Earth consortium pledges to restore its newly acquired real estate on Earth to a natural, pre-Industrial condition and to prevent occupation or development upon it for a period of two hundred years.
It's not a devotion to Gaia that motivates the wealthy, however, but achieving the final goal of globalism--the private ownership of the planet. And with ownership comes privileges. No misnomer, Garden Earth will be the most exclusive club in the solar system. Admission limited to members only.