Void Star is a well-written piece of speculative fiction with strong characters and extensive world-building. The language is vivid, and was almost able to draw me in - but as someone who doesn't usually read sci-fi, I found it a bit too dense to completely fall into. However, I completely admire Mason's abilities and I think many readers will love this novel.

A different perspective on the post-trancendant tech explosion. Unsurprisingly society is even more divided by having/not, so this explores the slim trails of ascendancy and reduction in status through the medium of a crime thriller.

I had high hopes for this book. Set in the near future, it deals with AI’s, memories, and morality. However, it didn’t pull through for me. While there was certainly action, nothing seems to actually happen. Multiple storylines took forever to come together. I hardly cared about the characters. So while the backbone was certainly there, it didn’t flesh out in the way that I had hoped.

Fun and interesting, glad I picked it up.

This story takes us on the paths followed by three characters very different from each other: Irina, carrying a brain implant that gives her perfect memory and access to AIs; Kern, a young refugee from the San Francisco favelas, who taught himself through books and martial arts thanks to a laptop found in a dump; and Thales, son of a murdered Brazilian politician, whose life hangs by a thread only because his body may reject the implant that saved his life at any moment.

The world depicted in the novel is not exactly cyberpunk, not exactly transhumanistic, not exactly dystopian, but a blend of all three? Life-prolonging and youth treatments exist... only for those who can afford them. The implant in both Irina and Thales’s brains is exceptional... but. Large corporations dominate everyday life, but the protagonists are different from their more usual cyberpunk counterparts. Earth is going through climate changes and places like Singapore are gradually going underwater, and many people don’t have access to basic necessities... but at the same time, a sense of wonder still permeates the story, if only because of the way the characters are confronted to various threats and obstacles, yet also to hopes and openings towards new paths. Kern’s laptop, for instance, because of what it represents, or could represent, for a young boy living in the streets. Or the inhuman and fascinating beauty of the AIs introduced here, the destructive Cloudbreaker and the elusive Mathematician.

This is both close to us, making it possible to grasp it, with its technologies that we can understand (tablets and phones, albeit somewhat obsolete for the wealthier characters), and at the same time deeply alien and full of mysteries (what would it be like to live with a perfect, artificial memory you can access just whenever, yet that may send you into seizure and kill you?).

‘Void Star’ reads well, although for some reason I felt like taking my sweet time with it, perhaps because unconsciously I didn’t want to finish it too fast? It may sometimes be a wee difficult to follow, since it doesn’t rely on detailed explanations, instead taking its readers through its characters’ travels; I quite liked that, though—I like that in general in SF/F, even though I know I can’t read such stories when I’m too tired, for fear of losing my pace and missing important hints. While some events appeared, as a result, a little confusing, in the end I could still piece everything together. The three main narratives are well interwoven—chapter Y actually holds the missing answers to what happened in chapter X, and so on—and even when I didn’t have all the information to understand their world in the beginning, it wasn’t much of a problem.

Conclusion: Not the easiest read around, due to its (beautiful but sometimes complex) descriptive language and concepts; however, if one is ready to tackle that, this book can be positively fascinating.

I was not enjoying this book at all and I made it to about the 15% point before giving up. Maybe you need to be a gamer to know (or care) what's going on here, but for me this was just not a pleasant experience. I also confess that I am not a fan of first person present tense narratives. I received a free copy of the ebook from the publisher, but I wound up listening to the audiobook borrowed from the library.

A thrilling, gorgeously-written cyberpunk dystopia.

Thoughtful and philosophical, this book is rich in characters and imagery. Set from the viewpoint of 3 different people, the integration of AI (artificial intelligence) into our future world is explored brilliantly.

I rarely start a book without finishing it. Unfortunately, I didn't get all the way through Void Star by Zachary Mason. I should have followed the clues on Amazon. "The best and most beautiful book about computers since Neuromancer." I really didn't like Neuromancer. "Void Star utilizes a deliberate, predatory pace more common to the most exquisite horror novels." I am no fan of horror novels. "The hallucinatory beauty of the prose . . ." Yeah, those hallucinatory sequences unmoored my mind from the book . . . and got me hallucinating about reading something else. "His language delights . . ." True, he does have some nice language and colorful prose (plus some vocabulary I had to look up). I just didn't get into his style. Or the story.


I know it may not be fair to review a book I didn't read all of. I just felt like moving on to something else. I'm giving this a middle-of-the-road 3 out of 5, recognizing that readers who like this genre will probably like the book. It just wasn't for me.


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

A book about technology, artificial intelligence, immortality, memory, the nature of existence itself... and confusion. That last one tends to dominate, for better or worse. I've seen reviews that love the book's florid descriptions and the depth of insight, and others that find it all impenetrably detached, slow-going, overly confusing. I land somewhere in between: <em>Void Star</em> is all of that and more, flawed and brilliant, ponderous and fascinating in turns. The technology shines brighter than the characters, and the plot is rather hard to follow, but there's <em>something</em> here that kept me going. I have no problem setting a book aside if it isn't holding my interest; this one took patience, but I'm glad I saw it through.

Mason writes what you might call "literary near-future SF": think latter-day William Gibson with the "detached chill" knob dimed. Descriptions are pristine and nearly constant, rich in $10 words like "imbricate" and "arabescato" that do fit rather well, despite their tendency to disorient. Human behaviors are coolly observed, subtle psychological insights described through a layer of glass, almost clinical in their sense of remove. The prose is sharp but often obtuse without meaning to be, like something written by a scientist who can't quite disengage the full weight of his intellect, so it has a tendency to dip into the pretentious zone. Similarly, the narrative is built around three unrelated characters whose actions and backgrounds we don't fully understand until much, much further into the book, which lends a sense of comfortable incomprehension (if that makes any sense at all): the language is generally gorgeous, and the snapshots of action within each chapter (some incredibly short, which I honestly love) are often fascinating on their own, but wrapping your head around the larger picture is an exercise in frustration until the final third of the novel.

Where <em>Void Star</em> shines, however, is in its vision: Mason, in the real world, spends his days as a computer engineer or something similar, studying artificial intelligence, and that deep understanding of unknowable complexity informs the story at every turn. Memory implants, rejuvenation treatments, perpetual surveillance, full integration of robotics into society... Mason's vision of the world in a hundred years feels less like science fiction and much closer to our own world after a few more generations of technological development. That is to say, it feels real. His vision of a "smart" laptop designed by an NGO to teach impoverished children to survive by any means necessary is brilliant; it occupies a single chapter of the book, but it's so perfectly drawn it ends up pulling the disparate threads of plot into something resembling <em>relief</em> against the backdrop of endless description and disorienting perspectives. Inevitably, a lot of readers will find this book frustrating, which isn't to say it's particularly hard to read—it just takes patience. Whether it's worth it is ultimately up to you. Caveats aside, I took my time and enjoyed myself.

This is one of those books that can literally change how you see the world. At times it was a bit confusing, but it mattered SO much that I understand, that it had me concentrating on the periphery of my mental acuity, widening my cerebral pathways, deepening the layers of recall. To be achingly cliche: it broadened my horizons.
Zachary Mason's prose is hypnotic, poetic, and unapologetically challenging. A true pleasure to read.

The book showcases a talented author with beautiful prose, but the wordiness can sometimes get in the way of the story-telling. It's a dense novel and it can be a bit hard to get through, but readers who finish are rewarded with a unique science fiction story with beautiful language and rich characters.

Void Star is a tough book for me to review. I didn't dislike it per se; it simply never grabbed me. I failed to connect with any of the characters, and though I read to the end, I never reached a point where I cared about their dilemmas or what would happen to them. Neither the character nor the plot inspired me to the point where the story truly gripped me. Although the premise appealed to me when reading the blurb, perhaps this just wasn't the right book for me. Maybe other, more hardcore, sci-fi readers will find it enjoyable, but for me it was only 2.5 stars.

I like challenging books, but this one took itself much too seriously and fell flat as a result.

This is a very geek-oriented dystopia set in the future in which reality is always a bit questionable, especially since there are AIs that have gotten too complex to control.

The plot follows several protagonists who have memory implants, and who gradually become connected to one another.

I have to say that although I admired the intelligence of the author, I was not enamored of the opacity of the plot. Probably much of it was just beyond my understanding. Frankly, I only finished it because I wanted to see how it ended, but it turned out I couldn’t really figure out the ending in any event!