The New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff has penned a rather puzzled and puzzling review of David Marusek’s Counting Heads. He begins with a lament that science fiction is inaccessible to average readers, and proceeds to use Counting Heads as a case in point. In the course of making his point, however, he makes obvious that all the things he loves about Marusek’s book are the very things that make it inaccessible. I could be an elitist and say that we who love science fiction should stop caring what those who can’t be troubled to understand it think, but I’ll take the opposite tack and say that science fiction’s problems with general acceptance are all about marketing and not about complexity. Look at The Time Traveler’s Wife, a science fiction novel with an asynchronous and complex plot: only it was marketed as literature, and sold well. [Thanks Ricardo!]