I'm impressed! This novel reads much more regularly than the previous one, sacrificing opportunities to World-Build in favor of character exploration and cool plot, so in the end it reads like a fascinating adventure of clones and the beginning stages of interstellar space exploration.

Of course, this wouldn't have been possible without all the stage-setting of the population-theme-based novel that preceded it, so I'm very happy to have read both very close together. It might even have been better to bill both these novels together as one long one, possibly, although the whole sequence of Sam would have just seemed like a long sidenote to the mother's and the daughter's stories.

As it is, I should say that the great idea-pace of the novel didn't really quit or stall in this one, either, but just continued along the kinds of paths and cool sidebars that a bit of creative thought could take it.

Memory and clones and the implications were extremely interesting, of course, building functional immortality quite separate from the kinds already found in this future earth, and perfectly in line with [b:House of Suns|1126719|House of Suns|Alastair Reynolds|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1447892903s/1126719.jpg|2020929] from the PoV of very early days. :) I don't want to give away too much, but it really puts mother and daughter in a whole new category of interesting. And longevity. With fish. :)

As for space colonization, this novel is just as interesting, the driving forces to get our eggs out of one basket butting heads with politics, economics, and pure spite. Lots of intrigue and manipulations going on here, too, and this novel goes well beyond the kinds of social considerations and themes of the previous, and firmly into strong plot territory.

I really can't say anything bad about it at all. Parts were reminiscent of [b:Cyteen|834518|Cyteen (Cyteen #1-3)|C.J. Cherryh|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1316469389s/834518.jpg|820134], parts of [b:House of Suns|1126719|House of Suns|Alastair Reynolds|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1447892903s/1126719.jpg|2020929], some was propelling the spirit of Asimov's robot novels, and parts were almost PKD in the paranoia. :)

Very fun stuff. :) ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3036653.html

Mind Over Ship is quite closely linked to the first book - the combined sequence of events takes place over a short period of time, and the reader is banged right into the action. But if you can catch your breath, there are a lot of great ideas here - the collective and individual politics of clones, the manipulation of the launch of generation starships, the character whose severed head is attached to a slowly growing new body, another character whose consciousness has been transferred to a swarm of fish. And yet the plot doesn't quite resolve, and some years later we are still waiting for the third volume of what feels like a trilogy. Maybe when that emerges we'll see the form of the whole more clearly. ( )

How psyched am I that this is the second in what seems obviously to be a trilogy? I can't say how much I loved COUNTING HEADS so so much, and MIND OVER SHIP more than held up. Honestly, Marusek is for my money the most interesting voice in science fiction today. (Wasn't that a grand pronouncement?)

My one beef is with what seems to be the author's bonkers social darwinist worldview (that biological men evolved to be attracted to children and that nature just hasn't caught up with culture yet. Or something.). This is a fairly minor plot point that comes almost 300 pages in, with a few little fake forshadowings earlier. Still, not recommended for people who are understandably traumatized by that sort of wrong-headed justification of abuse. ( )

Fantastic hard SF, easily as good as Neal Stephenson. This is a sequel to his [b:Counting Heads|499429|Counting Heads|David Marusek|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1175274758s/499429.jpg|487556], which I must now read immediately. ( )

In the sequel to Counting Heads, Marusek picks up the story several months later with several continuing viewpoing characters and a few new ones. He doesn’t spend a lot of time getting new readers up to speed, and I wish I had re-read the first book before I’d opened this one, to get all of the characters and their agendas fresh in my mind. The intrigues surrounding Earth’s first fleet of interstellar colony ships continue, and we get to see them from high-level maneuvering as well as the front lines. Marusek begins to weave in a few posthuman themes, highlighting different branches that superhuman intelligence could take, and continues to explore the ramifications of clone labor forces. The book leaves one of its larger themes unresolved, so expect this to grow into a trilogy soon. ( )