Void Star

by Zachary Mason

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250159410
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	666,584
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Zachary Mason is a computer scientist and the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey. He lives in California.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

1. Floating World 3
2. High Playground 5
3. Oculus 7
4. Negotiable Sense of Place 11
5. Working 15
6. What Forgetting Is 20
7. Discipline 22
8. Unreal City 25
9. Matches 28
10. Laptop 40
11. Theater 50
12. Clinic 55
13. Secret Book 63
14. Ghost 66
15. Future Shift 74
16. Circumference 82
17. Tunnel 84
18. Essential Hardness 91
19. No True Security 93
20. Fundamental Things Never Really Change 101
21. Someone 109
22. Shapes Purely 112
23. Finish Up 116
24. Stillness in Memory 122
25. Just Leaving the Station 129
26. Nonexistent Prisons 132
27. Venice Replicated 136
28. Departure 147
29. Bad Pattern 156
30. Ossuary 163
31. Refuge 167
32. Still Unformed 170
33. Encoded in Form 175
34. Final Sword 177
35. Persephone 183
36. Usually in Trouble 189
37. Cloudbreaker 198
38. Thought Purely 205
39. Lost Coast 207
40. In the Palm of Her Hand 211
41. Oublier 217
42. Tangle of Snakes and Darkness 221
43. Intimacy of the Mundane 223
44. Great Dark Forward 226
45. Good Thing to Own 231
46. Exact Enumeration of Blurred Flocks 237
47. Something to Cry About 242
48. World Is a Chessboard 251
49. Closely Coupled Forms of Nothing in Particular 259
50. Our Lady of Drones 266
51. Never Really Have Happened 271
52. Sphinx Explains Our Horror 275
53. A Little Beyond the Law 281
54. Unwieldy, Lovely, Perhaps Eighteenth Century 288
55. Form on the Water 293
56. Axis Mundi 297
57. Vaguely Cetacean 300
58. Touch Nothing 302
59. Telemetry Irreconcilable 307
60. What They Really Wanted 308
61. Hole in the Wall 310
62. Flaw in His Vision 317
63. Purpose, Impatience, Suffering 324
64. Difficult Transition 329
65. Babel 331
66. Change of Plan 340
67. Future Selves Forgive Her 343
68. Beyond Is Hidden 351
69. Island in the Past 354
70. History Lacks a Story 357
71. Dolos 362
72. Memorial 365
73. Masamune 367
74. Marmont 370
75. No Longer Metaphor 375
76. Continuity 380
77. Arabescato 384

Acknowledgments 387

Editorial Reviews

[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

“Speculative fiction has long wrestled with . . . ethical quandaries, but rarely has it done so with the power of language and prescience found in Void Star. Mason’s prose is prodigious in scope and exultant..."
—Hayden Robel, Zyzzyva

"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 (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)

"Code becomes flesh in Zachary Mason's sentences. He shows us the near future of technological experience, where death becomes a 'stillness in memory,' and God is a pattern of numbers. This is the best and most beautiful book about computers since 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

"Zachary Mason’s magisterial new novel is a passionate immersion in science fiction, sure to delight even the most hardcore devotees of Samuel R. Delany, China Miéville,and Philip K. Dick. The greatest speculative writing intoxicates and terrifies us in equal measure with the visions it offers, and in this Void Star is no exception. A dazzling book."
—John Wray, author of The Lost Time Accidents

"Readers who enjoy Cormac McCarthy and China Miéville but wished they had had more influence from Neal Stephenson might find this book is just what they’re looking for."
—Dawn Kuczwara, Booklist

From the Publisher

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
Odyssey, 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
Chapter 15, "The Myrmidon Golem." In this section, Odysseus and a pal construct "a clay simulacrum of Achilles . . . They lured a pretty young slave girl to the cellar with hints of assignation and preferment, and cut her throat as soon as she walked in the door.
They hollowed out a cavity in the golem's chest and filled it with her blood so that the golem could partake of her bloom." Alas, all does not go well. "In the confusion of battle, [the golem Achilles]
sometimes killed at random, ignoring the Greeks' terrified,
indignant cries, and so he became feared by Greek and Trojan alike."

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-
singularity conspiracy tale that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with similar recent work by Max Barry, Nick Harkaway, Neal
Stephenson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Matt Ruff, Ariel Winter, and Ryan
Boudinot, 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:
time for much to change, yet not so far as to render a scene wholly unconnected to the recognizable passions and problems of 2017.
Many of this distant era's projected saliences are familiar from canonical cyberpunk works. Realpolitik savagery as the norms of the nation-state collapse, and the establishment of zones of anarchy and temporary autonomy. The privileging of wealth and corporate sovereignties. The dominance of artificial intelligences and growing essentiality of the virtual/networked sphere. The ethical quandaries of the freelancer, the deracinated solo agent in a gig economy, desperate for survival. The deterioration of the ecosystem and the Baudrillardian proliferation of hyperreality and estrangement from nature. These tropes, first explored fictionally over thirty years ago, in the seminal works by Gibson, Sterling, et al., might seem like yesterday's news. But Mason's fresh burnishing of them, his willingness to invest some deep thoughts into how the last three decades have mutated these omnipresent trends, makes all of it new again. The book reads like an up-to-the-
minute report from the battlefronts of a perpetual war we tend to ignore, so much in our faces is it.

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-
metronomic regularity (some gaps in the rotating pattern are necessitated by the plotting), the story unfolds with a sense of both unpredictability and fatedness that most novels would find hard to sustain, and which is all the more pleasing when deftly accomplished, as here.

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,
owned by a Vancouver research lab from her last gig but one.
Metatemetatem is a name given to a class of AIs that burn through trillions of possibilities a second in search of the shape of their successors; every Metatemetatem had been designed by its predecessor for some thousand generations and ninety years. There must have been some definite moment when they'd passed beyond the understanding of even the subtlest mathematician, though when this happened is a matter of debate -- all that's certain is that no one noticed at the time. Now most of the world's software, and, lately,
its industrial design, comes from machines that are essentially ineffable, though only a handful of specialists seem to realize this,
or care, the world in general blithely unaware that the programs and devices that mediate their lives have emerged from mystery.

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
L.A. while still fighting back on the run.

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,
both psychological and corporeal, in their quest to understand
Cromwell's schemes and counter them. The first half of the book is centered in California, with the second half opening up to other international venues. Finely sketched subsidiary characters will be deployed as well, among them Philip, Irina's college-era pal; Hiro,
a mercenary; and Maya, Irina's agent. The climax finds Irina undertaking a hero's quest in a virtual reality, climbing a metaphorical mountain to meet the master mathematician behind everything.

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,
but the technology never really matured and now no one much uses them.)" At one point Kern goes to ground at the base of a defunct space elevator. Akemi explains: "[It's the] space elevator.
At least, it was going to be. Basically it's a giant cable going up into low orbit -- it was supposed to be a cheap alternative to rockets, but between the deflating economy and some spectacular failures of engineering it never actually got used. The cable still goes up into space, but now it just sort of sits here." This recognition that all our beloved gadgets are transitory is a valuable one.

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,
tribalism and warmed-over post-Marxism, their chaotic melees driven solely by a roaring trade in opium. An often repeated quote on the boards is "If you want to bring peace to Southeast Asia,
make better synthetic heroin."

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,
luminescent forms in an endless descent, and the city is like a nebula, radiant with meaning, and this is how she finally knows she's dreaming."

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 --
all in a single year. William Gibson has called his work "spooky,
haunting, and hilarious." His reviews have appeared in The
Washington Post, Science Fiction Weekly, Asimov's Magazine,
and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Reviewer: Di Filippo, Paul

The Barnes & Noble Review

02/13/2017
Mason portrays late-22nd-century Earth as a dark and desperate world populated by drones, slums, rising tides, longevity treatments, and artificial intelligence. His fleeting images of harsh cityscapes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Thailand evoke an inhuman coldness. Three characters unwittingly take part in a globe-spanning scheme to stop a powerful AI that hijacks people with memory implants to interpret the world for it. Thales, the son of a Brazilian politician, receives such an implant after surviving an assassination attempt. Irina Sunden uses her implant to link with AIs and learn how they think. Street fighter Kern, from the favelas, steals the wrong phone. When Irina finds computer code in city graffiti, she links with Akemi, a ghost woman trapped in an AI, the voice on the other end of Kern’s phone. Together they help Irina contact the powerful Cloudbreaker AI and get revenge on Cromwell, a wealthy recluse who wants Irina’s memories. Patient readers who persist through the excessive layers of description will be rewarded with a vivid story, complete with a chilling and satisfying ending. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/15/2017
In this technothriller, set in a not-too-distant, postapocalyptic future, coastal cities have been submerged, growing income disparities have led to masses living in drone-built ghettos, AIs programmed and maintained by shadowy forces are seemingly in charge, and cures for aging are available for those who can afford them. Among this world's inhabitants is Irina, a contractor whose brain implant gives her a prodigious memory and the ability to act as an intermediary between her various employers and the AIs. Her talents bring her to the attention of Cromwell, a rapacious tech baron with a benign image who wishes to use her abilities—and her memories—to further his own ends. Meanwhile, Kern, a ghetto dweller, martial arts devotee, and small-time thief, is being pursued by thugs after he steals an unusual cell phone. And the mathematically-minded Thales, son of the Brazilian prime minister, helps Irina take on an all-powerful AI known as Cloudbreaker, with the assistance of Akemi, a Japanese actress, in the novel's ultimate confrontation. VERDICT 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. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Library Journal

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

AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile

★ 2017-04-18
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.Dystopian fiction thrives on taking present facts and trends and extrapolating them into the future, making the bad even worse. Mason (The Lost Books of the Odyssey, 2010) fully honors this genre convention. Are the ice caps melting? Fine: a century or so from now, let's put New York underwater, make an archipelago of San Francisco, a glittering city of towers that is "remote, incorruptible, a place outside of time." Is inequality rising? Then we'll have a world in which the rich live entirely apart from the poor, who in turn inhabit Rio-style favelas in the hell that is Los Angeles—and most of the rest of the world, for that matter. In this future, AI algorithms are almost ready to emerge into full consciousness, and when they do, humans won't much matter. Enter Irina, an intermediary with an implanted memory who can interpret bots to humans and vice versa. Her employer, a super-tycoon named Cromwell, wants nothing more than to live forever, though he is already "approaching the limit of what life extension can do." AI might be of help there, though even the wealthiest and most capable of Mason's characters—including a Brazilian heir to a fortune and a brilliant though bent-toward-bad intellectual—are having trouble figuring out why the avatars and disembodied voices of the machines are misbehaving so. Cromwell also wants what's inside Irina's brain, which she has to put to good use escaping the many traps he lays for her, helped along by a growing insurrection among the have-nots. Parts of the book are overwritten, and the many threads of the storyline show a bare patch here and there, but in the main, Mason's story makes a fine ode to freedom of thought and being in an oppressive time. A richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany.

Kirkus Reviews