Oftentimes a writer's whole career is implicit in his or her first novel, the lineaments of their vision plain from the start -- at other times, a debut book can be a one-off or represent an early vector that will suddenly bend ninety degrees and accelerate from zero to sixty.
Zachary Mason's admirable first novel, The Lost Books of the was a pre-technological meditation on archaic yet eternal themes and characters and moods from Homer's masterpiece. Quiet and dreamy, unhurried, its prose more cool than hot, showing levels of metafictional playfulness, it seemed the work of a young John Barth.
The only chapter that might have hinted at what was to come was
This Daedalus/Dr. Frankenstein–inspired parable, with its vision of a literally heartless, cruelty-based killing technology run amok, points us at least somewhat in the direction of Mason's sophomore novel, Void Star . A post-cyberpunk, post-Void Star resides as far from his first book as the year 2017 is distant from the simple heroism and primal societies of Homer's time.
Contextual clues reveal that the book is set at least one hundred years into our dilapidated, delirious, decadent, yet defiant future:
Mason's narrative is tripartite, threading together over time the destinies of its at first seemingly unrelated characters. Employing short, punchy chapters that alternate viewpoints with near-
The three protagonists receive almost equal page time, but I still get the sense of Mason assigning them different priorities in terms of their centrality to events.
First up is Irina Sunden, a well-off professional with an almost unique niche: she deals with "the inner lives of AIs." These powerful yet surprisingly not dictatorial software entities have transcended human limits, and insofar as their motives and plans can be understood, an AI-whisperer like Irina -- who possesses a special implant to aid in her work -- is essential.
She remembers the Metatemetatem, an AI that makes other AIs,
Given this job of ministering to machines, Irina seems a direct and deliberate literary descendant of Asimov's Dr. Susan Calvin. Her latest client is a billionaire named Cromwell, who turns out to have a very specific interest in Irina and her implant, and after a dramatic foiled kidnapping, Irina is forced to flee her lush life in
Kern is a poverty-enmeshed thief, living in a shabby West Coast favela, adept in a kind of urban parkour and self-taught martial arts mastery. Tasked with grabbing a victim's phone that turns out to be of more than ordinary value, he finds himself tracked by deadly assailants. When the phone begins addressing him in the persona of a Japanese woman named Akemi and offering to help him escape his pursuers, he has little choice but to accept the aid. (One hears echoes of the instructive intelligent Primer in Stephenson's The Diamond Age .) Soon he will be traveling further and into very different social strata than he ever expected.
Last up is a Brazilian mathematical prodigy named Thales. After being severely wounded in the assassination of his father, he receives a brain implant like Irina's. Coming to the USA for his safety, he begins to suspect that his actions are being controlled by the surgeon who saved him. When he encounters an enigmatic woman named Akemi, his life rapidly splits at the seams.
These three figures will survive numerous incidents of violence,
Besides providing a compelling plot, Mason scatters speculative insights and observations liberally, as the best SF writers do. For instance, he does not make the mistake of assuming his fancy new technologies are eternal, or even dominant in the moment. One case is the implant that Irina has; it's already dead tech. "Only a few dozen people ever got her kind, less than ten are left, and she dreads questions. (Even the simplest implants are getting phased out -- you used to need one to be a combat officer in the Marines,
And here's Mason's depiction of your standard Third World hellhole, like 2017 Syria or Afghanistan amped up to the max:
Officially, the Thai army is defending the nation's territorial integrity against a salad of narcotraffickers, rebellious indigenes, bandits and incursions from what had been Burma and is now, he gathers, fucked. In practice, according to the chatter on the net, it's a free-for-all, the combatants indifferent to nationalism, Combining these impressive off-the-cuff aperçus with startling imagery, vibrant characters, and consequential deeds, all couched in gorgeous, smoothly polished, poetic and sensual language, Mason engineers a near-perfect SF machine.
One final resonance lies with that master who underpinned so much of the first-generation cyberpunk work, Thomas Pynchon. At one point Irina gets a glimpse of urban geography's visionary secrets: "A pattern in the flawed latticework of lights, something deeper than the incidental geometry of buildings and streetlight, to which the city has, unwitting, conformed itself, and, with this revelation, what she had taken for single lights expand into constellations, and each of their lights is a constellation in itself,
Compare that passage with Oedipa Maas's famous observation in The Crying of Lot 49:
She thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out) . . . Like Pynchon, Zachary Mason is determined to probe at the existential heart of our modern conundrum, even if it means confronting the void star at the core of our ultimately unknowable predicament.
Author of several acclaimed novels and story collections, including Fractal Paisleys, Little Doors, and Neutrino Drag, Paul Di Filippo was nominated for a Sturgeon Award, a Hugo Award, and a World Fantasy Award -- The and The San Francisco Chronicle.
Reviewer: Di Filippo, Paul
The Barnes & Noble Review
02/13/2017
[Zach Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal —Charley Locke, Wired —Chelsea Hassler, Newsweek Void Star . Mason’s prose is prodigious in scope and exultant..." —Hayden Robel, Zyzzyva 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 Void Star is] a richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany." —Kirkus (starred review) 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) Neuromancer ." Michael Clune, author of Gamelife: A Memoir "Void Star is an extraordinary novel. The hallucinatory beauty of the prose is matched only by the book's velocity and mystery, and the story—of mortality, memory, and what it means to be human—holds all the force and power of mythology."Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven Void Star is no exception. A dazzling book."—John Wray, author of The Lost Time Accidents —Dawn Kuczwara, Booklist
★ 02/15/2017
Reading with the dispassionate intensity of skilled narrators, Cassandra Campbell, Sean Pratt, Tristan Morris, and Michael Braun lead the listener on a dark and shattering tour of an all-too-near dystopian future. In it, humans with brain implants communicate directly with computers, memories are for sale, and a few lucky billionaires have access to “genetic life extension” that can make them all but immortal. As the three main characters and three disparate plots slowly weave together to wage a final, epic, private war on a common enemy, the pace and emotionally detached narration continues unabated. In the traditions of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick, VOID STAR offers up a gray, challenging future. B.P. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
★ 2017-04-18
