Mind games
Is it possible for a near-future cyberthriller to feel old-fashioned? “Void Star,” the new science fiction novel by Berkeley writer Zachary Mason, reads like something William Gibson might have concocted in the ’90s, a far-ranging, globe-trotting tale of memory, mortality and artificial intelligence.
Gibson’s “Neuromancer” boasts one of science fiction’s most famous first lines: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The beginning of “Void Star” seems to echo that opening image, as Irina Sundren, an expert in interfacing with inscrutable AIs, flies in a dream toward San Francisco International Airport in a time ravaged by climate change: “Below her are the lights of the valley, like burning jewels on a dark tide.”
Perhaps not as evocative an opening as Gibson’s, but vivid enough to induce a feeling of nostalgia with readers of a certain age and cultural sensibility.
Thanks to the memory implant in her brain, Irina knows how to interact with the superpowerful artificial intelligences created by the high-tech honchos of Silicon Valley. Serving clients with vast wealth at their disposal, Irina works to earn enough to journey to the Mayo Clinic each year. She goes for longevity treatments with a sky-high price tag, a regimen that will all be for naught if interrupted even once due to lack of cash.
While in the Bay Area, Irina meets with
James Cromwell, founder of Water and Power Capital Management LLC, “an innovator in AI-driven resource arbitrage and medical engineering.” One of W&P’s AIs is being inexplicably balky, and Cromwell wants Irina’s assistance in finding out why. Irina wants Cromwell’s business, but she does not trust him, — with good reason, as it turns out. After a possible kidnapping attempt, Irina focuses on the meaning of the image of a laptop screen she saw reflected in her potential employer’s eyeglasses.
A second plot thread in “Void Star” follows Kern, a young thief and a killer for hire, one who maintains a monkish existence practicing martial arts in the drone-built slum that has accreted around San Francisco’s periphery. When he steals the wrong phone from the wrong victim, Kern exposes himself to danger of an entirely different order of magnitude.
A young woman speaks to him through the purloined device, claiming that she has been kidnapped and imprisoned in a Los Angeles basement. She begs Kern to leave town immediately and save her. Marked for death by the owners of the phone, Kern heads south with a new passport and a pocket full of cash.
The third member of the narrative triangle is also based in Los Angeles. The survivor of the attack in which his politician father was assassinated, Brazil-born Thales, now crippled but outfitted with a memory chip that keeps him alive, finds himself unable to remember much of what happened before the installation of the implant. During a visit to a medical clinic to have his implant fine-tuned, Thales is shown video clips from Irina’s visit to Cromwell at Water & Power.
Gradually, the three plots converge into one narrative as Irina, Kern and Thales are pushed by mysterious forces toward a reckoning with Cromwell. The motley trio will face violence, treachery and the possibility of physical transcendence.
A computer scientist who works in the South Bay, Mason made his literary debut with “The Lost Books of the Odyssey,” a postmodern re-imagining of Homer. With “Void Star,” Mason proves that he is also adept at building a credible near-future, choreographing three-part edge-of-yourseat plotting and emulating the mirror-shades-at-midnight cool of onetime cyberpunks such as Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson and Pat Cadigan.
Much of the fun comes in the small details and throwaway lines, as when super-fit Kern is told he looks like he “live[s] on protein and Zen Buddhism” or when memoryenhanced Irina says, “Proust’s madeleines have got nothing on me. It’s madeleines all the way down.”
Lots of scenes are set in transit, with characters riding in driverless cars, maneuvering streets with weaponized drones overhead or wending their way through airports. The different locales offer intriguing glimpses of reimagined cultures and extrapolated technology, as well as a metaphor for psychological dislocation. Some readers may wish that the characters would just land somewhere for a while. (True to its forebears, there are, of course, scenes set in Japan.)
Mason understands the propulsive appeal of cyberpunk, the opportunities it affords for mind-bending plot twists, serious philosophical speculation and arch social commentary. Gibson has said many times that he knew nothing about how computers work when he conceived his first novel. Mason, in contrast, has 30 years of technological progress and his own academic background to rely on in writing convincingly about how artificial intelligences might actually operate a few decades hence.
The novel’s title is apparently an allusion to “an oddly hopeful reference to an archaic programming language in which void star was a reference to a thing of mutable kind, which spoke to the coders of the chance for metamorphosis.”
It is that quest for metamorphosis that makes “Void Star” more than just a carefully constructed homage to a oncehip subgenre. The reader comes to care about Irina, Thales and Kern as they struggle for survival and perhaps something beyond life and death. The narrative has an usually long denouement, but it is satisfying to learn what ultimately happens to these characters.
“Void Star” treats the best aspects of cyberpunk with respect and imagination and adds its own fresh speculations about AIs and other digital marvels. Mason is clearly a versatile talent, and his second novel may be a harbinger of even more ambitious work to come.