Void Star (2017) by Zachary Mason

 Book Review

Void Star (2017) 

by Zachary Mason

    Void Star is that rarest of finds, a "little library" pick-up.  Our neighborhood in Atwater Village has one really great little library that picks up a lot of books discarded by people who work in film, occasionally it will pick up five or six great books at the same time.  Void Star is the first book I've actually taken in four or five years.  I was intrigued by the idea that a major literary fiction focused publisher (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) had published this book in 2017.   Neuromancer by William Gibson was published in 1984, 33 years before 2017 making Void Star something of a cyberpunk revival book.  When it was published, it got a brief shout-out in a New York Times Book Review article about the new Dystopian Literature (Published March 2017), but was then forgotten in the 2018 review of Metamorphica, which misidentified Mason's last novel as 2010's The Lost Books of the Odyssey.  

    This information, coupled with the fact that I'd never heard of Void Star until I selected it from the Little Library made me even more intrigued.  Having completed the reading over several months of waiting in jail to visit clients, I can see why Farrar, Straus & Giroux published it in the first place, and also why it didn't make much of an impression with the reading public.  As many readers opined at the time, it is, at times, as difficult to understand as the densest modernist prose, despite a fairly conventional cyber-punk/dystopian lit scenario.   

  In 2025 I think the best pitch for some revival of interest is the integration of AI themes- a move forward from the one-note malevolence of 2001's Hal computer.  But if you are looking for some straight cyberpunk sci fi that is written as dense as the densest literary fiction Void Star is your jam.  Thanks North Atwater Little Library!