Books › Void Star
Void Star
394 pages
A tense, cerebral plunge into a flooded, drone-patrolled future where memory is a commodity and artificial intelligence borders on the incomprehensible.
What it feels like
This cerebral, near-future thriller plunges readers into a starkly divided world of flooded coastlines and drone-patrolled skies. The narrative feels propulsive and paranoid, weaving together the isolated lives of a memory-enhanced AI medium, a favela-dwelling martial artist, and a grieving political exile. As their paths converge through shadowy forces and dangerous secrets, the atmosphere grows increasingly dread-soaked and claustrophobic. The prose balances high-concept explorations of artificial intelligence and perfect recall with the visceral, gritty reality of extreme wealth inequality and survival. It is a tense, atmospheric experience designed for readers who love cyberpunk-infused dystopias where technology outpaces human understanding and every stolen secret carries a lethal price.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- shadowy
- paranoid
- bleak
- Tone
- tense
- cerebral
- gritty
- urgent
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- the burden of memory · extreme wealth inequality · the opacity of artificial intelligence · interconnected fates
- The writing
- Sharp and atmospheric, balancing high-tech cerebral concepts with the visceral grit of a dystopian world.
- The arc
- Moves from isolated, gritty survival to a tense, paranoid convergence of fates.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave cerebral, near-future cyberpunk thrillers where memory, AI, and extreme inequality collide.
Content notes
- violence
- class inequality
- parental death
- chronic injury
About the book
Although the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, it's still a good time to be in San Francisco, where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn't rich, 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 aging. Kern, on the other hand, 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, the mathematically inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan, has fled to L.A. after an attack that left him crippled and his father dead. Life goes on until one day, Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop's screen in her employer's eyeglasses, Kern steals from the wrong mark, and a ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. As they're pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight, Irina, Kern, and Thales learn that none are safe.--
Description from Open Library.
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