Thursday 27 April 2017

SCIENCE FICTION DYSTOPIAN REVIEW: Void Star - Zachary Mason

Release Date: 27/04/17
Publisher: Jonathan Cape

SYNOPSIS:

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 ageing.

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.


REVIEW:

Sad to say that I was expecting quite a lot out of this book and was sadly disappointed with a tale that was very cold and a bit too clean almost as if a super computer had written it and removed all warmth from within. Thats not to say its a terrible book, it was just a title that didn't gel with me purely for the fact that I couldn't find a character within that I liked or wanted to spend time around.

Whilst it will appeal to a number of readers out there, it really wasn't my bag of *micro" chips and whilst I could see some good solid writing with decent prose all round it just didn't want to keep me engaged with what was happening within. A great shame.

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