Title Void Star Series --- Author Zachary Mason Cover Art Daniel Cheong Publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux - 2017 First Printing Farrar, Strauss and Giroux - 2017 Category Science Fiction Warnings --- Main Characters Irina, Thales, Kern, Akemi, Cromwell Main Elements Cyberpunk

A riveting, beautifully written, fugue-like novel of AIs, memory, violence, and mortality

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.

Vivid, tumultuous, and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Mason’s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

Discovered this book in one of those neighbourhood book exchange boxes, thought it was perfect timing since I was doing an SF year. As a bonus, I had read Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey and particularly enjoyed it while on my mythology themed year.

I'll start off by saying I didn't give this book a fair read. For whatever reason I would read it only on weekends, maybe get through 70 pages and then leave it for the rest of the week. This is not a book that benefits from that and I started forgetting important bits when I returned to it. I did eventually focus and finished it off in two days but part of the damage was done and I think some of my leftover confusion comes from that.

The other part is that this books is a bit hard to follow, intentionally so, but maybe not a clear enough wrap up at the end for everything to sort itself out in my head. It questions one understanding of reality, of what it means to be alive or even what a person is. No matter how you look at it, it makes you think, especially about how much memories define who we are. I have an uncle that passed from Alzheimers so it's definitely something I've thought about before. In fact reading this book a second time would be very interesting, knowing what one knows about the characters but right from the start, it would give a very different feel to the read.

But for all that I still didn't particlarly enjoy this book. I was mostly confused as to what was happening to Thales, I didn't like Irina nor Akemi, and the only one who I felt anything for was a street fighter / petty thief. Even Cromwell didn't come off as much of a villain since I had trouble figuring out how much he was behind things and how much it was just some rogue A.I's running the show (and what was that whole Cloudbreaker things about...) And towards the end everyone just seems to become suddenly all powerful in incomprehensible ways, it's a bit like those hacker movies where the guy pops up a terminal, types madly, and tadah, he's broken into the Pentagon. But its not that easy, not even in a virtual reality version of the same. And don't forget to toss in a kind of post-climate apocalypse world as a setting...but other than making for interesting scenes and backdrops, this has no bearing on the story at all. Because of this, much as I think a second read might be a good idea, I'm not sure I'll actually read that second read.

I'll note however that the novel's title made me happy...it's not actually some weird kind of black hole or spaceship but...well I won't give a hint but I've likely mentioned my profession in other reviews and I really got this one. I know a lot of people who wouldn't but to be fair, they probably wouldn't be reading a cyberpunk book either!