Void Star

<p>Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying but it&#146;s still a good time to be rich in San Francisco where weapons drones patrol the skies to keep out the multitudinous poor. Irina isn&#146;t rich not quite 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&#146;s a good gig paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from ageing.<br><br>Kern has no such access; he's one of the many refugees in the sprawling drone-built favelas on the city&#146;s periphery where he lives like a monk training relentlessly in martial arts scraping by as a thief and an enforcer. Thales is from a different world entirely &#150; the mathematically-inclined scion of a Brazilian political clan he's fled to L.A. after the attack that left him crippled and his father dead. <br><br>A ragged stranger accosts Thales and demands to know how much he can remember. Kern flees for his life after robbing the wrong mark. Irina finds a secret in the reflection of a laptop&#146;s screen in her employer&#146;s eyeglasses. None are safe as they&#146;re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight.<br><br>Vivid tumultuous and propulsive <i>Void Star </i>is Zachary Mason&#146;s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut <i>The Lost Books of the Odyssey</i>.</p>