[Void Star] reads like something William Gibson might have concocted in the ’90s, a far-ranging, globe-trotting tale of memory, mortality and artificial intelligence ... With Void Star, Mason proves that he is also adept at building a credible near-future, choreographing three-part edge-of-your-seat plotting and emulating the mirror-shades-at-midnight cool of onetime cyberpunks such as Gibson ... Void Star treats the best aspects of cyberpunk with respect and imagination and adds its own fresh speculations about AIs and other digital marvels. Mason is clearly a versatile talent, and his second novel may be a harbinger of even more ambitious work to come.
...there is at times a hallucinatory quality to the book, which shifts cleverly between dreams, simulations and digital hinterlands between life and death. But as well as being a philosophical work of speculative fiction, Void Star is also a sprawling multi-viewpoint thriller, in which individuals flee capture or death, battle rogue computers and corrupt humans, and traverse continents to seek answers ... Yet despite these literary innovations, Void Star begins to lose its way when Mason concentrates his energies on pursuing a more conventional SF action plot, in turn threatening to drown out those quiet stories that his remarkable machines are telling themselves.
...an enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage ... Void Star’s particular tricksiness lies in its not revealing when some apparently physical location might be a virtual hallucination — and even when some apparently real characters are just memory reconstructions running on computers, unbeknown to themselves or the reader. This is clever, but sometimes feels cheap: a character will die dramatically, only for it to turn out that it was just a copy ... But Void Star’s larger drawback is that, as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract.
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 ... 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 ... 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.
As Mr. Mason spins out an elaborate and highly confusing techno-thriller, he explores a future in which humanity has increasingly subordinated itself to machines it doesn’t understand ... Mr. Mason writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty...But the whole feels recondite and detached, as if it were intended to evoke the 'opaque complexity' of artificial minds. As the story merges the physical world with virtual realms it becomes difficult to grasp just what is going on. One puzzled character sums it all up: 'There’s a pattern but I can’t quite see it.'”
The novel challenges the reader in a variety of ways, mostly good ones, and showcases a distinctive voice, one that inspires interest in what it will say next ... China Mieville comes to mind as a comparable author, someone creating meticulous and wildly imaginative speculative worlds that are experiential rather than traditionally character driven, although he and Mason both create living breathing characters. It’s just that the people driving the action can feel as if they move according to an agenda rather than their own organic lives ... Mason’s conception here of AI is fascinating—its limiter is only itself and us. In the world of Void Star, we stare at each other across the uncanny valley between us, and that other eye never blinks.
Patient readers who persist through the excessive layers of description will be rewarded with a vivid story, complete with a chilling and satisfying ending.
