 | |
| Author | Zachary Mason |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | April 2017 |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | 978-0-374-28506-7 |
Void Star is a 2017 near-future science fiction novel by American writer Zachary Mason. It is his second novel, published after The Lost Books of the Odyssey . [1] Set in a near-future San Francisco, the book explores themes of artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics and immortality.
The plot revolves around three protagonists: Irina, a corporate consultant, who translates AI "glyphs," or waves of thought, for other people to understand; Thales, the son of a Brazilian politician; and Kern, petty thief raised in the favelas and self-taught martial artist. They are brought together when Irina and Thales, both of whom have cranial implants that enable perfect memory recall, learn that the contents of these implants can be exfiltrated.
Wired praised the book for being "written with the syntactic precision you might expect from a linguist, a computer scientist, a mathematician. Or a person who is all three" [2] but criticized the "plot [that] may leave you scratching your head." [3] The Guardian criticized the chapters set in virtual reality, writing that "as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract," but praises the other chapters, with their return "in the most satisfying of the various characters’ endings, to the physical realities of fire and steel." [4]
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech", featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay. Much of cyberpunk is rooted in the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers like Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner, J. G. Ballard, Philip José Farmer and Harlan Ellison examined the impact of drug culture, technology, and the sexual revolution while avoiding the utopian tendencies of earlier science fiction.
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965. Like many of Dick's novels, it utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and explores the ambiguous slippage between reality and unreality. It is one of Dick's first works to explore religious themes.
Ringworld is a 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. Ringworld tells the story of Louis Wu and his companions on a mission to the Ringworld, a rotating wheel artificial world, an alien construct in space 186 million miles in diameter. Niven later added three sequel novels and then cowrote, with Edward M. Lerner, four prequels and a final sequel; the five latter novels constitute the Fleet of Worlds series. All the Ringworld novels tie into numerous other books set in Known Space. Ringworld won the Nebula Award in 1970, as well as both the Hugo Award and Locus Award in 1971.
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans—a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
Stand on Zanzibar is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel at the 27th World Science Fiction Convention in 1969, as well as the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo Award.
The Commonwealth Saga is a series of science fiction novels by British science fiction writer Peter F. Hamilton. This saga consists of the novels Pandora's Star (2004) and Judas Unchained (2005). Hamilton has also written several books set in the same literary universe. Misspent Youth (2002) takes place 340 years before the events of Pandora's Star. The Void Trilogy, consisting of The Dreaming Void (2008), The Temporal Void (2009), and The Evolutionary Void (2010), takes place 1,200 years after the events of Judas Unchained; several of the main characters from Judas Unchained and Pandora's Star also appear in the Void trilogy.
Mundane science fiction (MSF) is a niche literary movement within science fiction that developed in the early 2000s, with principles codified by the "Mundane Manifesto" in 2004, signed by author Geoff Ryman and "The Clarion West 2004 Class". The movement proposes "mundane science fiction" as its own subgenre of science fiction, typically characterized by its setting on Earth or within the Solar System; a lack of interstellar travel, intergalactic travel or human contact with extraterrestrials; and a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written or a plausible extension of existing technology. There is debate over the boundaries of MSF and over which works can be considered canonical. Rudy Rucker has noted MSF's similarities to hard science fiction and Ritch Calvin has pointed out MSF's similarities to cyberpunk. Some commentators have identified science fiction films and television series which embody the MSF ethos of near-future realism.
Czarne oceany is a novel written in 2001 by Jacek Dukaj, Polish science fiction writer and published in Poland by Supernowa. The novel fits in the hard science fiction genre, describing the late-21st century Earth facing technological singularity. The novel received the prime Polish award for sci-fi literature, Janusz A. Zajdel Award, for 2001.
Trouble and Her Friends is a science fiction novel by American writer Melissa Scott, first published in 1994. It is set in the United States of America sometime in the near future, and tells the story of India Carless, who goes by the name "Trouble" in her life as a criminal hacker, and her ex-lover Cerise. After leaving the underground behind three years earlier, they discover someone impersonating Trouble online, and reunite to travel across the country to confront him. In its extensive use of virtual reality and neural implants, the novel is a solid example of cyberpunk; however, it is unusual for that genre for having, like much of Scott's work, a distinct feminist perspective and main characters who are gay or lesbian.
Simulated reality is a common theme in science fiction. It should not be confused with the theme of virtual reality.
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist and novelist. He wrote the New York Times bestselling The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a variation on Homer, and Void Star (2017), a science fiction novel about artificial intelligence. In 2018, he published Metamorphica, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Altered Carbon is an American cyberpunk television series created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on the 2002 novel of the same title by English author Richard K. Morgan. In a world where consciousness can be transferred to different bodies, Takeshi Kovacs, a former soldier turned investigator, is released from prison in order to solve a murder. The first season consists of ten episodes and premiered on Netflix on February 2, 2018. On July 27, 2018, the series was renewed for a second season of eight episodes, which was released on February 27, 2020, with an anime film set before the first season released on March 19, 2020. Though the series received generally positive reviews, it was canceled after two seasons.
Illuminae is a 2015 young adult space opera epistolary novel written by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. This is the first novel of the series The Illuminae Files. The story is told through a series of documents including classified reports, censored emails, and interviews. Illuminae is set in 2575 and is the story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her fighter pilot boyfriend Ezra Mason, as they become refugees after becoming caught in a political crossfire.
AI takeover—the idea that some kind of artificial intelligence may supplant humankind as the dominant intelligent species on the planet—is a common theme in science fiction. Famous cultural touchstones include Terminator and The Matrix.
David Karlak is an American director and writer, known for short films, The Candidate and Rise.
Virtual reality in fiction describes fictional representations of the technological concept of virtual reality.
Chen Qiufan, also known as Stanley Chan, is a Chinese science fiction writer, columnist, and scriptwriter. His first novel was The Waste Tide, which "combines realism with allegory to present the hybridity of humans and machines". Chen Qiufan's short fiction works have won three Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction, twelve Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. "The Fish of Lijiang" received the Best Short Form Award for the 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards. His stories have been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, MIT Technology Review, Clarkesworld, Year's Best SF, Interzone, and Lightspeed, as well as influential Chinese science fiction magazine Science Fiction World. His works have been translated into German, French, Finnish, Korean, Czech, Italian, Japanese and Polish and other languages.
A Science fiction podcast is a podcast belonging to the science fiction genre, which focuses on futuristic and imaginative advances in science and technology while exploring the impact of these imagined innovations. Characters in these stories often encounter scenarios that involve space exploration, extraterrestrials, time travel, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, robots, and human cloning. Despite the focus on fictional settings and time periods, science fiction podcasts regularly contain or reference locations, events, or people from the real world. The intended audience of a science fiction podcast can vary from young children to adults. science fiction podcasts developed out of radio dramas. Science fiction podcasts are a subgenre of fiction podcasts and are distinguished from fantasy podcasts and horror podcasts by the absence of magical or macabre themes, respectively, though these subgenres regularly overlap. Science fiction podcasts have often been adapted into television programs, graphic novels, and comics.