Void Star

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 its still a good time to be rich in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isnt 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. Its a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging.

Kern has no such access; hes one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the citys 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 entirelythe mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, hes 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 laptops screen in her employers eyeglasses.

None are safe as theyre pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight. Vivid, tumultuous, and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Masons mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

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.