[HQY]⇒ [PDF] Void Star A Novel eBook Zachary Mason

Void Star A Novel eBook Zachary Mason

Download As PDF : Void Star A Novel eBook Zachary Mason

Void Star A Novel eBook Zachary Mason

A couple of passages from the book should give you a sense of whether you'll like it.

First, here's one sentence that both shows the depth of language and gives a sense of the book's focus.
"Whatever liminal grace informs airports—some sense of perpetual arrival and departure, of being in an anonymous crowd united in separation from their proper lives—is absent now; the terminal stinks of disinfectant, and stalls blink garishly, trying to sell her perfume, T-shirts, duty-free alcohol, things Irina could not ever imagine wanting, and she has a sudden and overwhelming sense that the trip was a mistake, that she does not after all need the money, and wishes with all her being that she hadn’t come."

Zachary Mason loves his words, which is good and bad. That quote above is one sentence. I'm not going to count the commas. Sometimes Mason's voice gives a sense of the character's thoughts. Sometimes it just seems like he's trying too hard to be "literary."

Like the airport reference above, Void Star is about boundaries in the expanding computer age. What is real vs. simulated, and how much does the difference matter? It may not, as long as we retain the illusion.

Which brings me to the second quote.
"It’s a little like reading—the bedrock reality is black marks on a page, and those marks are nothing like the world, but your mind insists on making sense of them. The illusion is seamless, and thus hard to escape. Every inconsistency just gets explained away.”

Mason's style can be captivating, but it can also distract. What's the difference between literary prose and a bad run-on sentence? Mason will make you evaluate that boundary by the end of the book. If you're the type of reader who likes the first quote, then the seamless illusion will hold. If not, then the volume of commas and semicolons may overwhelm.


Tags : Void Star: A Novel - Kindle edition by Zachary Mason. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Void Star: A Novel.,ebook,Zachary Mason,Void Star: A Novel,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,Literary,Science Fiction - Cyberpunk,AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY,Artificial intelligence,Artificial intelligence;Fiction.,Computer Applications,Dystopian,Dystopian fiction,FICTION Dystopian,FICTION Literary,FICTION Literary.,FICTION Science Fiction Cyberpunk,Fiction,Fiction-Science Fiction,FictionDystopian,GENERAL,General Adult,Literary,Memory,Memory;Fiction.,Science Fiction - Cyberpunk,Science Fiction General,Science fiction,United States,literary fiction; contemporary fiction; dystopian fiction; dystopian novels; dystopian books; artificial intelligence; artificial intelligence fiction; science fiction books; science fiction and fantasy; contemporary novels; contemporary literature; american literature; cyberpunk; best book of the year 2017; new york magazine best book of the year; san francisco chronicle best books of the year,Dystopian,FICTION Dystopian,FICTION Literary,FICTION Science Fiction Cyberpunk,FictionDystopian,Science Fiction General,American Science Fiction And Fantasy,Fiction

Void Star A Novel eBook Zachary Mason Reviews

The author has the best vocabulary I've ever encountered and absolutely no familiarity with grammar. Here is an example

"She remembers the density of dark summer woods at the end of their freshman year, the white trunks pressed close around the pond, her flashlight skimming over the black water till the beam found his body among the ripples, and in the first moment of stark surprise she wondered if he’d drowned, and if it was deliberate, if his text had summoned her to bear witness to his death, but then he rose gasping in an eruption of foam; naked beside her on the muddy bank, he explained that he’d decided to stop speaking, for the semester, except, apparently, to her; he’d been sleeping all day, submitting homework online, seeking out lonely places, because it was too hard to be near other people; the quiet let his mind still."

There is some really amazing imagery in that sentence but about halfway through I lost interest. The whole novel is this way. Beautiful words being strung together until you yawn.

Fortunately the story is interesting and two of the main characters are written well enough to keep me reading. It was a close call though.
Lots of fun and a great read. I like Daniel Suarez and William Gibson and Void Star fits into that section of the bookshelf. According to the Wired review, I expected a lot of interaction between humans and AI to see how the eminently qualified author would handle this interaction. You don't get a lot of that but what you do get is a group of very interesting characters that you come to care about and their individual and interlocking stories fuel this interesting narrative. I am glad I read it and would recommend it for readers looking for a thrilling story written by a man with a first class mind that is set in the future.
Void Star posits a future based on our present where divisions between wealth and poverty are extreme but humanity's core attributes, encoded in memory, emerge to smooth the glide slope to better future. The entanglements between hardware, software and wetware are blended into a well told tale.

Perhaps most interesting is the nature of AI in the story - not the AI of terror and fiction - but AI that is a creature of a universe of software and hardware that is challenged to understand the "real" world. This is AI as understood by a someone who actually is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence.

This feels like a look at the world my children will inhabit, wrapped up in a story that has a beginning, middle and a satisfying ending.
A couple of passages from the book should give you a sense of whether you'll like it.

First, here's one sentence that both shows the depth of language and gives a sense of the book's focus.
"Whatever liminal grace informs airports—some sense of perpetual arrival and departure, of being in an anonymous crowd united in separation from their proper lives—is absent now; the terminal stinks of disinfectant, and stalls blink garishly, trying to sell her perfume, T-shirts, duty-free alcohol, things Irina could not ever imagine wanting, and she has a sudden and overwhelming sense that the trip was a mistake, that she does not after all need the money, and wishes with all her being that she hadn’t come."

Zachary Mason loves his words, which is good and bad. That quote above is one sentence. I'm not going to count the commas. Sometimes Mason's voice gives a sense of the character's thoughts. Sometimes it just seems like he's trying too hard to be "literary."

Like the airport reference above, Void Star is about boundaries in the expanding computer age. What is real vs. simulated, and how much does the difference matter? It may not, as long as we retain the illusion.

Which brings me to the second quote.
"It’s a little like reading—the bedrock reality is black marks on a page, and those marks are nothing like the world, but your mind insists on making sense of them. The illusion is seamless, and thus hard to escape. Every inconsistency just gets explained away.”

Mason's style can be captivating, but it can also distract. What's the difference between literary prose and a bad run-on sentence? Mason will make you evaluate that boundary by the end of the book. If you're the type of reader who likes the first quote, then the seamless illusion will hold. If not, then the volume of commas and semicolons may overwhelm.