Simondlevy's Reviews > Void Star

After the brilliance of Mason's "Lost Books of the Odyssey", I was eagerly awaiting his next book. Although different in both format (a traditional novel, not a collection of vignettes) and setting (the near future, versus the heroic past), "Void Star" doesn't disappoint. (The title is a sly reference to a common trick in C/C++ programming, allowing the programmer to undermine the safety features of the language in order to build a solution more quickly.)

Like the Achilles of the Lost Books, the hero of Void Star is a professional fighter/killer, a passionate, cerebral young man caught in a treacherous international intrigue from which there seems no escape but violent death. By putting him in a very plausible dystopian landscape -- a North America of favelas and criminal cartels -- Mason makes him and the other characters all the more vivid: they are the children or grandchildren of people alive today.

If your tastes in fiction tend to to space-opera spectacle, or encounters with wise, gentle aliens who teach us Important Life Lessons, then Void Star probably isn't for you. But if you are old enough to remember the thrill of early cyberpunk fiction (William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, et al.) or enjoy the rich near-future dystopias of Paolo Baciagalupi or China Mieville -- or if you just enjoy beautiful, skillfully-crafted narrative -- I can't think of a more exciting new novel than Void Star.