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 LA 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 critically acclaimed novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
About the Author :
Zachary Mason is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey. He lives in California.
Original bio sent from Cassandra:
Cassandra Campbell began doing voice overs as the voice for Calvin Klein's Italian commercials. This was followed by commercial and documentary recording in both English and Italian. She has recorded many audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards as well as an Audie(R) Award nomination. As an actress and director, she has worked at the Public, the Mint, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stagewest, Theatreworks, the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival, Millmountain Theatre, the National Shakespeare Company, and the New York Fringe Festival.
Tristan Morris is an Earphones Award-winning narrator. He received an MFA in acting from the New School for Drama in New York City after studying theater and philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University. His work as a voice actor began in 2011 after training with master teachers Scott Brick, Pat Fraley, and Nancy Wolfson. He works in New York City and Denver creating new theatrical works.
Lloyd James (a.k.a. Sean Pratt) has been a working professional actor in theater, film, television, and voice-overs for more than thirty years. He has narrated over one thousand audiobooks and won numerous Earphones Awards and nominations for the Audie Award and the Voice Arts Award. He holds a BFA degree in acting from Santa Fe University, New Mexico.
Michael Braun is an experienced and versatile narrator with over one hundred credits on Audible (both under his name as well as various pseudonyms) in genres ranging from thrillers to young adult, science fiction to romance.
Review :
"A complex and spellbinding tale of a future where self-preservation, in every sense of the word, is a victory."
-- "Library Journal (starred review)"
"A propulsive adventure story...fascinating characters attempting to survive in a transformed yet strangely familiar world, the only thing that isn't eerily plausible is just how thrilling this adventure of the artificial mind is."
-- "BuzzFeed"
"A vivid story, complete with a chilling and satisfying ending."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
"Elegant...written with the syntactic precision you might expect from a linguist, a computer scientist, a mathematician. Or a person who is all three."
-- "Wired"
"Extraordinary...The hallucinatory beauty of the prose is matched only by the book's velocity and mystery."
-- "Emily St. John Mandel, National Book Award finalist"
"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."
-- " New England Review of Books"
"Readers who enjoy Cormac McCarthy and China Mieville but wished they had had more influence from Neal Stephenson might find this book is just what they're looking for."
-- "Booklist"
"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."
-- "AudioFile"
"This is the best and most beautiful book about computers since Neuromancer."
-- "Michael Clune, author of Gamelife: A Memoir"
"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."
-- " Newsweek"
