Void Star

By: Zachary Mason

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Tristan Morris, Sean Pratt, Michael Braun

Length: 15 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's Summary

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 aging.

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 LA 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 is 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 critically acclaimed novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

©2017 Zachary Mason (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

if you're That Guy

Starkly beautiful cyberpunk meditations to contemplate over red wine at dusk. If reading that sentence makes you want to punch someone in the throat even as you can begrudgingly relate, buy it.

Beautifully written sci-fi masterfully performed

Would you consider the audio edition of Void Star to be better than the print version?

With the different narrators each performing a different POV character, it made differentiating the different story lines easier. In the book, chapters are generally less than 10 pages long and characters can change rather rapidly. Hard to judge if it was better than reading the book, but the production value was high and I know the narration heightened the experience of certain scenes in the book.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Void Star?

The ending, especially in relation to Kern, is very satisfying and truly enriches everything that preceded it. Much of the prose is very beautiful and reminds of some of the best and classic books I've read in the past. Sometimes it feels more like poetry but it fits just perfect.

Which character – as performed by the narrators – was your favorite?

Irina, performed by Cassandra Campbell, and Kern, performed by Michael Braun, stood out most to me. Braun perfectly captures Kern's more frenetic violent story while also being able to relate the character's innocence and naivety. Campbell is doing most of the heavy lifting story-wise, but her performance really is beautiful and matches the prose very well while keeping an edge in more tense scenes.

Any additional comments?

I don't usually reread books, but I think I'll be revisiting this one. I'll definitely be picking up a hard copy.

so much potential

seemed to just drag on and on the story is actually really good but its split between three points of view that switched way to soon between them to fast and the narrators who I like seemed to talk like .. i dont know every sentence was a statement. Some one else might have a different opinion will buy authours​ next book even though this one was lacking. Definetly good enough to deserve a second chance.

Better book than audio

Maybe it was the distractions but I found the book a bit hard to follow at first. It was really well written but listening to it was a bit disorienting. The ending left me wanting more and it felt like a very mellow dramatic wrap-up.

Au currant sci-fi, artfully written

This book successfully creates a future world of believable future problems. It goes beyond that, and addresses what truly good literature gets at, which is the human experience. The big fears, the little moments, the constant heartbreak.

I liked the ensemble of male and female narrators reading for the mix of characters. It made the audiobook easier to follow.

Good cyberpunk.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Well written, complex. has the Gibson thing going for it, in a good way.

I really tried.

This book is so obscure! I kept listening, got very interested, then completely lost! so the cycle starts over. I really wanted to like it. One of the charecters seems so disjointed from the story. if you can call it a story. I like stories that switch pov's but this was horrible. as soon as you get attached to one it switches, and you lose interest, then you forget what in the world is going on because time place is so obscure. I am not sure if this review makes sense, but if you understand read the book, if it was all over the place and you dont understand then pass. The story had potential. Very poor delivery.

A crescendo of confusion

The science and concepts of AI were interesting and is what pulled me in. The science of memory augmentation kept me interested for the first half of the book. As the story starts to emerge through the view of three protagonist things fall apart into a rather dull and predictable conclusion. Ultimately your just left wondering where all the interesting bits went as the story wraps in a neatly tied fairy tale end.

everyone gets a happy ending except for the baddy

Character depth much?
I wouldn't generally ask for character depth in a sci-fi story, but the actual sci-fi is rather lacking as well, so what else is there?
Characters, are lacking, and thus is any character development. The stroytelling relies on not telling you what's actually going on, which could be a neat trick, but when crucial information is withheld for more than half the book it rather feels like the lack of story was covered up by hiding things. Perhaps there is some great moral question explored in this book: the dangers of technology, the new economic reality of the post-ecologic-catastrophy world, the socio-economic stratification and the implications? Any of these subjects alone would have been a great story to explore. Instead we have a vague picture of post-apocalyptic world, personalized medicine ad absurdum, a hint of a libertarian wet dream and a nothing burger for a conclusion.

Everything you want

This book is nearly perfect. The writing style is lush and clean. It's moody and completely enveloping.