Void Star

A riveting, beautifully written, fugue-like novel of artificial intelligence, memory, violence and mortality

Sentence by sparkling sentence, Zachary Mason’s Void Star is [a fine] novel… Void Star is an aesthetic joy, with a chilling style often reminiscent of Don DeLillo.

A computer scientist by day, Mason deploys serious literary chops in a cyberpunk escapade that should have the producers of Total Recall or Inception drooling… Mind-bendingly engaging and most definitely not for nerds only.

An enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage.

Void Star is an extraordinary novel. The hallucinatory beauty of the prose is matched only by the book’s velocity and mystery, and the story – of mortality, memory- and what it means to be human – holds all the force and power of mythology.

Zachary Mason's magisterial new novel is a passionate immersion in science fiction, sure to delight even the most hardcore devotees of Delany, Mieville, and Dick. The greatest speculative writing intoxicates and terrifies us in equal measure with the visions it offers, and in this Void Star is no exception. A dazzling book.

One of the most richly complex novels of the year.

Highly ambitious: an epic tale of future alternative realities that straddles the genre line between high-tier science fiction and formally inventive literary fiction… There is at times a hallucinatory quality to the book, which shifts cleverly between dreams, simul&shy;ations and digital hinterlands between life and death. But as well as being a philosophical work of speculative fiction, Void Star is also a sprawling multi-viewpoint thriller, in which individuals flee capture or death, battle rogue computers and corrupt humans, and traverse continents to seek answers… Mason, as both computer scientist and prose stylist, is well placed to render opaque concepts in ways that we not only understand but find beautiful.

Zachary Mason is the author of the New York Times bestsellingnovel The Lost Books of the Odyssey and, more recently, Void Star, which has been optioned for film.He lives in California.

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.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

An extraordinary imagining of episodes, fragments and revisions of Homer's Odyssey, a book destined to become a modern classic.

A subtle, inventive and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls 'the drunkenness of things being various'

Dazzling...an ingeniously Borgesian novel that's witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive. Mr. Mason has found a supple, lyrical voice in these pages that captures the spirit of the original Odyssey and at the same time feels freshly contemporary...a stunning and hypnotic novel

Spellbinding. In his versions of these ancient myths Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself

A small triumph...the invention on display is beguiling...He offers the reader a book of intellectual fireworks that also manages to be wonderfully entertaining

Mason allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths...Mason delights in doubles, spirals, conceptual mazes and Moebius strips...he is a wondrous pleasure to read

Dazzling fiction... Following in the tradition of Borges, Mason brilliantly reveals a hero even more ambiguous than in Homer's original and an ancient world beset by 21st century uncertainty

Dazzlingly imaginative modern take on the oldest of fairy tales...always the alternate universe is created with amazing invention, a poet's gift for a resonant image

What cannot be stressed enough is the simplicity and control of the verbal texture of the book

Playful, gripping and teasingly philosophical without ever being overwhelming, the book reimagines in plain yet often poetic prose many of the Odyssey's key stories, tantalising the reader with alternative outcomes, unexpected twists and haunting interludes

After ten years' journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead. 
 
In these forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's Odyssey, Zachary Mason uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting alternative and contradictory fragments of familiar stories - the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens - allowing us to see Homer's masterpiece afresh. Elegant, provocative and utterly fascinating, The Lost Books of the Odyssey seems destined to become a modern classic.

Zachary Mason

A glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus.

Zachary Mason in Metamorphica has done away with traditional modes entirely... well-wrought, with some powerful writing... Even knowing the myth's grisly end does not diminish the impact of the retelling.

Mason adds new perspectives to the mythical stories we thought we knew.

Zachary Mason’s new retellings are playful and daring… with…Mason’s intriguing Calvino-esque storytelling, this is a constellation of stories that should star on your bookshelf.

In the tradition of Zachary Mason’s bestselling first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey – where he recast episodes from Homer’s masterpiece – Metamorphica now reimagines Ovid’s epic poem of endless transformation, Metamorphoses. Just as the Roman poet reinvigorated the Greek Classical legends 700 years after Homer, so Mason now gives us a radical and exciting renovation of those myths, 2,000 years after Ovid. 
 
It retells the great stories of Narcissus, Orpheus, Persephone, Icarus, Midas, Medea and Actaeon, and strings them together like the stars in constellations – with even Ovid himself entering the narrative. It’s as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino – or artificial intelligence – and brought glimmering back into our world. Metamorphica re-engages with the elemental power of the ancient shape-changing gods by keeping their essences while rewriting their stories. It is this extraordinary narrative approach that is so thrilling; we watch as the author extracts more and more out of the original legend – adding infinite perspectives to narratives we thought we knew. Mason understands that the great myths are parables – always in flux, always relevant – always throwing shards of light from the morning of the world.

Zachary Mason

Praise for Metamorphica

A glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus.

Zachary Mason in Metamorphica has done away with traditional modes entirely... well-wrought, with some powerful writing... Even knowing the myth's grisly end does not diminish the impact of the ...

Mason adds new perspectives to the mythical stories we thought we knew.

A glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus.

Zachary Mason in Metamorphica has done away with traditional modes entirely... well-wrought, with some powerful writing... Even knowing the myth's grisly end does not diminish the impact of the ...

Mason adds new perspectives to the mythical stories we thought we knew.

A glorious compendium of classical mythology stretching from the creation of the universe to the Emperor Augustus.

Zachary Mason in Metamorphica has done away with traditional modes entirely... well-wrought, with some powerful writing... Even knowing the myth's grisly end does not diminish the impact of the ...

Mason adds new perspectives to the mythical stories we thought we knew.

Books by Zachary Mason

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter