Void Star
A Novel
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ISBN10: 1250159415
ISBN13: 9781250159410
Trade Paperback
400 Pages
$23.00
CA$31.50
Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it’s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn’t rich, not quite, but she does have an artificial memory that gives her perfect recall and lets her act as a medium between her various employers and their AIs, which are complex to the point of opacity. It’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging. Kern has no such access; he’s one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city’s periphery, where he lives like a monk, training relentlessly in martial arts, scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely—the mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, he’s fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead. A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight.
Reviews
Praise for Void Star
[Zach Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty."—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"Elegant . . . written with the syntactic precision you might expect from a linguist, a computer scientist, a mathematician. Or a person who is all three."—Charley Locke, Wired
"Zachary Mason creates a world in which the line between human and computer is completely erased, yet he still manages to make the reader feel for all the characters—both man and machine—equally. Add that to a highly addictive plot and an exploration of memory’s impact on our identity, and you’ve got one of the most richly complex novels of the year."—Chelsea Hassler, Newsweek
"Gorgeous . . . Reminiscent of the work of giants like Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson, Void Star is a towering, twisting, and oracular ziggurat. Mason carries on rich science fiction traditions while saturating readers in heady prose that they may not anticipate from this sort of novel. The prose is at once intoxicating, enchanting, and mournful."—Paul Rowe, New England Review of Books
"Imaginative, intelligent vision of a future in which the machines we build take an unusual interest in us even as we seek to exploit them further . . . [Void Star is] a richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Mason's follow-up to The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a complex and spellbinding tale of a future where self-preservation, in every sense of the word, is a victory."—Library Journal (starred review)
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
1
Floating World
Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide. The Bay is a negative space around them, its leaden ripples picked out in the moonlight. There is, Irina realizes, a pattern...
About the author
Zachary Mason
