I tried and tried again and its just not fun to read this. The ideas are interesting but the language and the action are hard to follow for no good reason. ( )

I have always considered Silicon Valley one of those places people moved to when they were old enough to look for a job in the software industry. Zachary Mason won’t have that problem because he was born there. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science, works for a Silicon Valley start-up, and writes science fiction novels in his spare time. His second novel, Void Star, reminds me of the early work of William Gibson—except that the technology and sociology of a West Coast version of the Sprawl are considerably updated. Void Star begins almost where Neuromancer ended. AIs have moved beyond us and now create virtual worlds for their own mysterious purposes.
The novel follows three characters whose lives interact with the virtual worlds created by the Ais. Irina, Mason’s version of Henry Dorsett Case, will never need to jack in to a console. A chip in her head gives her perfect recall and enhances her ability to read the glyphs in which AI code is written. Thales, the scion of a Brazilian politician injured in an assassination attempt, has much of his brain replaced by computer hardware. Kern, a street kid who aspires to a career as a martial artist, becomes addicted to an interactive game he finds on an obsolete laptop. Eventually, all these stories will come together in an unexpected but satisfying way. ( )

Good well-rounded characters, excellent CP atmosphere, ok story... but my god the countless useless words, the endless long winding phrases going nowhere, the (sooo many) useless pages... the boredom! ( )

Mason's previous book The Lost Books of the Odyssey was spectacular, so I'm unhappy that this sci-fi novel didn't live up to it for me, especially because as a computer scientist this should have been home turf for him. On a prose level, this is great; there are no iconic, standout lines like Neuromancer's "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel", but just about every sentence is beautifully written, well-balanced and full of interesting imagery. There really isn't a wasted sentence in the whole book, so his various scenes and landscapes are always vividly rendered. However, much like in Neuromancer (and a lot of this novel is like in Neuromancer), the plot isn't very emotionally resonant, so the lucid language feels wasted. Characters act, choices are made, and things then happen, but according to a rapid, purely internal logic that doesn't give the reader much opportunity to get invested in the world, especially because the point of view shifts so rapidly and a lot of the various perils come out of nowhere. "Sit back and let the plot take you for a ride!" sounds like cheesy marketing copy on the back of an airport thriller, but it's also pretty apt here, and I didn't like feeling like such a passive reader.

The world is your standard cyberpunk quasi-dystopia that owes much to Snow Crash (itself an affectionate Neuromancer parody/homage), but without the manic humor or invention of Stephenson's work, so instead of people living in self-storage complexes guarded by armed robot dogs, people just live in grungy favelas, and instead of Sumerian technolinguistic mind-viruses, there's just really powerful Hackers-style algorithms (they literally hack the Gibson in one scene). I also found myself questioning why Mason bothered with 3 narrative lines for the main characters - ascetic street boxer Kern, dying political scion Thales, and Johnny Mnemonic-style hacker Irina - since although they do eventually intersect to fight the requisite evil rich guy and super-powerful AI, their individual quests to uh, find the secret of life/upload consciousness into the computer/become a Japanese swordmaker don't feel emotionally connected at all. Maybe the characters could have spent more time together, or there could have been fewer 2-page chapters to let the story breathe a bit; certainly many aspects of the world could have used some more exploration. I hate ragging on a work by an author I respect so much, so perhaps this will improve on a reread, but this feels like a real letdown, especially because he was able to be so creative with almost literally the most played-out material in history in his last book. I hope he takes more risks in his next book. ( )

It is great to read science fiction that's targeted at more than a grade-school reading level. In this case, though, Mason gets too caught up in his language, to the detriment of plot and character development. (And Mason's writing, while fun, isn't fantastic. I've never read an author who likes "flocculent" so much.) The dream/cyber scenes, à la the Matrix, are particularly hard to read; Mason is trying too hard to make his writing "magical," and it comes across a bit inane. I was least convinced by Thales (a main character whose name we are told how to pronounce 300+ pages in).

The ending is anticlimactic. After having meandered through most of the book, Mason suddenly expects us to see this as an epic story---and it's not. The villain is dispatched in a costless chapter (with our heroes only watching on TV), and the shadowy "mathematician" AI is exposed and sent away, again in one chapter.

- “Did it work out? Whatever you were trying to do?”
- “I think so. If it hadn’t I don’t think I’d be here. I don’t remember very much about it, and to be honest I don’t care."

If the characters can't stir themselves to care, how can we? ( )