Void Star

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.