Emmett Mottl's Reviews > Void Star

There's many fascinating ideas in this novel, but it sorely lacks a sense of place. The idea of towering cities built by autonomous drones and AIs is lovely, but I had a difficult time putting together the fragments of the world that Zachary Mason created. Much like the characters, I finished the story with little sense of what the world was like, other than a terrible, diluvian badland covered in concrete and badass sword fighting clubs. Don't get me wrong, there's some sicknasty wordplay here and beautiful descriptions, but there's far too much confusion for the sake of confusion. Why are cities getting built upwards by robots? How is food supplied when literally everyone lives in either a favela, a hardened hotel with a standing army, or a clinical citadel with a standing army? A lot of it is generic science fiction plopped in to buttress the point Mason is trying to get to— AI is inherently unknowable.

I imagine some of the confusion is by design (because future), but sometimes when reading this I, too, felt like I was in a fugue state. Also, the Yakuza seem to be the only rational and reasonable players in this world, and they are the ones running the sword fight death matches.