CANR
WORK TITLE: Metamorphica
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 2/26/1974
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 308
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/books/10mason.html http://www.slate.com/id/2244933 http://noggs.typepad.com/the_reading_experience/2008/06/zachary-masons.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 26, 1974, in CA.
EDUCATION:Brandeis University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Computer scientist and writer.
AWARDS:Finalist, New York Public Library’s Young Lions competition, 2009.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist and writer who described himself in a Psychology Today interview with Hara Estroff Marano as “an artificial-intelligence scientist interested in the character of cognition—how language works, how thought works, and how to model them.” He explores these interests in his first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, an imaginative retelling of Homer’s epic poem. The novel consists of forty- four episodes that present alternative versions of events from the Trojan War and from Odysseus’s ten-year journey back to his home in Ithaca. Through these retellings, Mason questions basic assumptions about heroic action, character, and the structure and functions of narrative.
Initially published by Starcherone Books, a small independent press, the book received little notice. Though Mason hoped to attract the attention of staff at the New York Times Book Review by sending them a copy of the novel inside a custom-built Trojan horse, the paper did not run a review of the book. But three years later, The Lost Books of the Odyssey was published in a revised edition, and this time it received widespread acclaim. Commentators admired the book’s lyricism, originality, and playful but insightful treatment of the theme of storytelling itself.
In Mason’s reimagining, for example, Odysseus’s homecoming differs markedly from that described by Homer, which has Penelope fending off the advances of a host of rival suitors whom Odysseus must outwit. Mason, in contrast, writes that the hero arrives home only to find his wife, now gray and plump, married to a sleepy old man. “It is the least dramatic of all possible returns,” observed Adam Mansbach in the New York Times Book Review, “and Mason captures the horror of this banal defeat.” The book’s segment “Guest Friend” recounts Odysseus’s escape from a would-be assassin. Another chapter presents the Iliad and the Odyssey as chess manuals, while in another, they are scripts created by the gods. In the final segment, an elderly Odysseus returns to Troy only to find that it has become a tourist attraction with Disney-esque characters in costume.
Hailing the novel as “not just vibrantly original but also an insightful commentary on Homer’s epic and its lasting hold on our imagination,” Slate contributor John Swansburg observed that “Mason hasn’t set out to give The Odyssey a postmodern spin so much as to explore the postmodern tropes already present in the poem.” Among these, for example, is the unreliable narrator. As Mason pointed out in an interview with Michael Hingston in Too Many Books in the Kitchen, Homer’s Odysseus “is such a fluent and joyful liar. I would think he would find it difficult not to concoct an elaborate, stirring, and possibly poisonous confabulation whenever someone so much as asks him if he’s had lunch. … It feels like just a nudge is required for the narrative to come apart into self-serving or doubtful or overtly contradictory fragments.”
Some commentators found the novel’s approach less than wholly successful. A writer for Kirkus Reviews, for example, considered the book “more playful than profound,” and Mansbach observed that though “Mason’s prose is finely wrought, … his chapters sometimes read like intellectual exercises masquerading as stories.” Katherine Eastland, writing in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, felt that the book’s “infatuation with conceit … [is] frequently obvious and distracting.” Nevertheless, Eastland praised the novel on the whole as a “strangely, memorably beautiful” work.
Discussing the novel’s treatment of narrative, Weekly Standard reviewer Bryant Kirkland noted that Mason’s stories “contradict and revise both the traditional Homer and often each other. And though they whimsically unmoor anything like a received tradition, they are evidence of something traditionally Homeric: The irrepressible pleasure both raconteur and audience experience in the art of good storytelling, even if the storyteller bends the truth.” Charlotte Higgins, writing in the London Guardian, made a similar point, observing that “at its best,” The Lost Books of the Odyssey reminds readers “of the indeterminacy of stories, the play between fate and free will, and the enduring power of that cool tactician, that teller of tales, that master of exploits, that long-enduring man, Odysseus.” New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, describing the novel as “witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive,” wrote that the book “not only addresses the themes of Homer’s classic—the dangers of pride, the protean nature of identity, the tryst between fate and free will—but also poses new questions to the reader about art and originality and the nature of storytelling.”
Many commentators noted the fascination with patterns in the novel. “It’s a very generative and constructive book, designed with repetitions and elongations that suggest someone with a mind for patterning,” observed Mary-Beth Hughes, quoted by Larry Rohter in the New York Times Book Review. “But the thing that is most beautiful is that out of this construction comes moving poetry, with wonderful interplay between the intellectual puzzles and soulful reading.” Indeed, Mason told Rohter that he approaches writing as a kind of science, and believes that thought and emotion can be expressed with “computational precision.” Elaborating on this point in the Psychology Today interview, the author stated that “I see both science and art, at least the kind of art I’m most interested in, which is literature, as different kinds of pattern languages in that we’re just trying to find the most beautiful things to say.”
Indeed, many reviewers noted the striking beauty in the novel. “Even when he falters,” wrote Mansbach in the New York Times Book Review, “Mason’s imagination soars and his language delights. He is a writer much like his protagonist: prone to crash landings, but resourceful and eloquent enough to find his way home.” Simon Goldhill, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, described each chapter of The Lost Books of the Odyssey as “a beautifully written vignette, which finds something of a starting point in the Odyssey but makes its own world … of fleeting and haunting memories, despairing hopes and uncanny epiphanies.” The cumulative effect, noted the reviewer, is “a fragmented, smoky, shimmering version of the Odyssey” that conveys “a brilliant understanding of how myth works: not like a handbook and not like a bible, but spreading, glancing, flowering, fragmenting, re-imagining.” Emphasizing Mason’s extraordinary technical control of the book’s “verbal texture,” Goldhill deemed The Lost Books of the Odyssey to be “intelligent, absorbing, wonderfully written, and perhaps the most revelatory and brilliant prose encounter with Homer since James Joyce.”
Void Star, Mason’s second novel, is set in a near future in which most people live in ghettos built by drones, and an elite few hold the majority of the wealth and power. It follows the characters, Kem, Irina, and Thales, as they deal with this reality in different ways. In an interview with Michael Berry, contributor to the Berkeleyside website, Mason commented on describing the book. He stated: “When forced, I say it’s a combination between Mrs. Dalloway and Neuromancer.” Mason also told Berry: “There’s something specific happening, in the book, but none of the viewpoint characters ever really see all of it, and some of what happens is only barely inferable from the text. Some readers seem not to like this, but I think its more interesting that way. If everything is explained neatly, it feels like a contrived riddle or the conclusion of an episode of Scooby Doo.”
Reviewing Void Star on the London Guardian Online, Steven Poole suggested: “It is an enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage.” However, Poole added: “There is a slightly creaky habit whereby, when the author wants to mention some nice detail, a character will helpfully ‘think of’ the relevant expository material. But Void Star’s larger drawback is that, as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract.” “Patient readers who persist through the excessive layers of description will be rewarded with a vivid story,” commented a Publishers Weekly critic. Lawrence Rungren, contributor to Library Journal, described the book as “a complex and spellbinding tale of a future where self-preservation, in every sense of the word, is a victory.” Writing in Booklist, Dawn Kuczwara noted: “The book is not for the casual reader looking for a quick, light read.” A Kirkus Reviews critic called the volume “a richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany.”
Metamorphica reimagines Ovid’s Metamorphoses and includes characters from other myths. It is comprised of short sections devoted to a particular character. Protagonists include Athena, Atalanta, Calypso, Midas, Helen of Troy, and Narcissus.
“Mason once again displays his ability to transform classical creations into a tale that is distinctly his own,” asserted a contributor to the online version of Booklist. Writing on the Medium website, Zachary Houle commented: “Metamorphica is an interesting and curious piece of writing, but will probably speak to only a very select amount of people. If your idea of a literary good time involves John Grisham or Stephen King, you will probably want to stay far away from this one. If not, cross yourself and dive in and see if you can make heads or tails of what’s really going on here.” A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked: “Both soaring and deep, this dazzling narrative creates a fictional universe of myth that transcends time itself.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly noted: “Readers familiar with Greek mythology will appreciate Mason’s mournful riffs highlighting the darker recesses of mythology.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2010, Bryce Christensen, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 42; February 15, 2017, Dawn Kuczwara, review of Void Star, p. 40.
Financial Times, May 15, 2010, Adrian Turpin, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 16.
First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, May, 2010, Katherine Eastland, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, pp. 54-55.
Guardian (London, England), May 15, 2010, Charlotte Higgins, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2009, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey; May 1, 2017, review of Void Star; May 1, 2018, review of Metamorphica.
Library Journal, December, 2009, Sally Bissell, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 100; February 15, 2017, Lawrence Rungren, review of Void Star, p. 82.
New York Times, January 28, 2010, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. C1; February 10, 2010, Larry Rohter, “The Calculus of Writing, Applied to a Classic.”
New York Times Book Review, February 14, 2010, Adam Mansbach, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 12.
Psychology Today, May, 2010, Hara Estroff Marano, “Trojan Horse in Silicon Valley: A Scientist Takes a Secret 10-year Odyssey to Literary Success,” pp. 35-36.
Publishers Weekly, September 28, 2009, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 41; February 13, 2017, review of Void Star, p. 44; May 21, 2018, review of Metamorphica, p. 39.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 2008, James Crossley, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, pp. 153-154.
School Library Journal, December, 2009, Matthew L. Moffett, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, pp. 145-146.
Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 2010, Simon Goldhill, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 2010, Don Fry, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 219.
Wall Street Journal Eastern Edition, February 11, 2010, Timothy Farrington, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, p. 19.
Weekly Standard, July 19, 2010, Bryant Kirkland, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
ONLINE
Berkeleyside, https://www.berkeleyside.com/ (May 3, 2017), Michael Berry, author interview.
Booklist, https://www.booklistonline.com/ (August 16, 2018), Alexander Moran, review of Metamorphica.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 26, 2017), Steven Poole, review of Void Star.
Medium, https://medium.com/ (August 6, 2018), Zachary Houle, review of Metamorphica.
New York Times Book Review Online, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 3, 2018), Emily Wilson, review of Metamorphica.
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/ (October 19, 2010), Steve Donoghue, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (February 18, 2010), John Swansburg, review of The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
Too Many Books in the Kitchen, http://booksinthekitchen.tumblr.com/ (October 19, 2010), Michael Hingston, “Q & A with Zachary Mason.”
Washington City Paper Online, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/ (March 4, 2010), Ted Scheinman, interview with Mason.
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence. He was a finalist for the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in California.
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist and the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey and Void Star. He lives in California.
Zachary Mason
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Zachary Mason
Born
1974 (age 43–44)
United States
Language
English
Genre
Fiction
Zachary Mason (born 1974) is a computer scientist and novelist.[1] He wrote The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007; revised edition 2010), a variation on Homer, and Void Star (2017), a science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.
Mason grew up in Silicon Valley, attended Bard College at Simon's Rock, and received a doctorate from Brandeis University, publishing his thesis A computational, corpus-based metaphor extraction system in 2002.[2] He works for a Silicon Valley startup.
QUOTED: "When forced, I say it’s a combination between Mrs. Dalloway and Neuromancer."
"There’s something specific happening, in the book, but none of the viewpoint characters ever really see all of it, and some of what happens is only barely inferable from the text. Some readers seem not to like this, but I think its more interesting that way. If everything is explained neatly, it feels like a contrived riddle or the conclusion of an episode of Scooby Doo."
Zachary Mason uses his skills as an artificial intelligence expert in new novel
3
By Michael Berry
May 3, 2017, 8 a.m.
Zachary Mason. Photo: Kai Parviainen
Computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Zachary Mason isn’t eager to reveal too much about his new second novel, Void Star.
Asked what he would want to tell a reader coming to the mind-bending near-future saga cold, the prize-winning Berkeley author says, “I would want to tell them nothing. They can find their own way.”
Seated on the patio of Mission Heirloom in the Gourmet Ghetto, Mason, 42, still jetlagged from his return from a writers’ retreat in Tuscany, relents a bit when pressed for elaboration.
“I hate describing it,” he says. “But when forced, I say it’s a combination between Mrs. Dalloway and Neuromancer.”
That’s an elevator pitch that actually says something meaningful.
Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on April 11, Void Star follows three disparate characters as they navigate a future world altered by climate change, social inequality, longevity extension, digital brain implants and the machinations of incredibly powerful artificial intelligences.
Irina Sundren, bearing an implant that bestows perfect recall, specializes in communing with AIs on behalf of their super-rich human creators. Brazilian-born Thales, a survivor of the assassination attempt that took his politician father’s life, also has an implant, one that imperfectly tries to reassemble his shattered memory. Thief and killer-for-hire Kern lives in the favela surrounding San Francisco until he steals the wrong phone from the wrong victim. Eventually, the three narrative strands converge into a meditation on mortality, reality and human and inhuman consciousness.
Mason will be speaking in Berkeley on Sunday, June 4 at 10 a.m. at the Bay Area Book Festival on a panel,”When Reality Meets Science Fiction,” with Cory Doctorow and Meg Elison.
On its shiny, high-tech surface, Void Star doesn’t seem to have much in common with the early 20th-century modernism of Virginia Woolf. As Mason admits, “Not much happens in Mrs. Dalloway. It’s just characters floating around London.”
While there is plenty of globe-trotting action in Void Star, that aspect of the narrative isn’t necessarily its primary objective. As Mason says about Mrs. Dalloway, “It’s about the consciousness of (three) characters and the texture of their experience. And that’s a lot of what I was trying to do with Void Star.”
The book’s connection to William Gibson and his first novel, Neuromancer, will likely be obvious to anyone who grew up reading what was once called “cyberpunk,” stories set where the barriers between the human and the digital worlds are more permeable.
Mason holds Gibson in high esteem. “Not (simply) a wonderful genre writer, but a wonderful writer. I think he is not even really a science fiction writer. He’s more of a literary writer who happens to work in genre.”
As for other influences on Void Star, Mason mentions Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Joan Didion and Patrick O’Brian.
“They all bled into it, to a degree,” he says.
Mason says he wrote the chapters in Void Star completely out of sequence, wanting to maintain the energy that sometimes gets lost after the beginning of a plot-driven novel. It also took him three or four years to write one chapter, in which Irina communes with an inscrutable AI.
Readers of Void Star” expecting easy answers to questions raised by the book may be disappointed.
Mason says, “There’s something specific happening, in the book, but none of the viewpoint characters ever really see all of it, and some of what happens is only barely inferable from the text.
“Some readers seem not to like this, but I think its more interesting that way. If everything is explained neatly, it feels like a contrived riddle or the conclusion of an episode of ‘Scooby Doo.'”
****
Mason grew up in the Bay Area, received his BS at Harvey Mudd College and went on to earn his doctorate in computer science at Brandeis. He spent a number of years in the South Bay – “shatteringly expensive, ugly, congested, dull” – before moving to Berkeley more than three years ago. Now he lives with his cat, Keta, in a house in the Berkeley hills, where a creek bed runs behind the home, wild turkeys roost in a nearby cedar tree and a mountain lion has been encountered a few blocks away.
“I moved here in search of a balance between living in the city and living in the wilderness,” he says. “I spent 18 months looking for a house in San Francisco but even when I got a bid accepted I ended up withdrawing because it felt claustrophobic. As a friend of mine says, in San Francisco, it’s never really dark, it’s never really quiet and you’re never really alone.”
Void Star is Mason’s second novel. The first, The Lost Books of The Odyssey, a post-modern reinterpretation and remixing of the Homeric classic, was written in isolation, with Mason telling no one what he was working on. When the manuscript was finished, he tried to get an agent.
“Failed utterly,” he says. “No one would even send me a rejection notice.”
But then Mason submitted The Lost Books to a contest sponsored by independent press Stacherone Books in Buffalo, NY. After he won first prize and had the first edition of the book published by Stacherone, he entered it in the New York Public Library’s Young Lions competition, for writers under 35. When the book became a finalist, Mason finally received the attention he had been seeking from agents, editors and fellow writers.
In 2010, FSG published a revised version, which became a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a New York Times Bestseller. Michiko Kakutani, the Times’ lead reviewer, called it a “dazzling debut.”
Next up for Mason is the publication of Metamorphica, another book in the vein of The Lost Books of the Odyssey,” based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A sequel to Void Star” is also in the works.
****
William Gibson has famously admitted that he knew next to nothing about networked computers when he wrote “Neuromancer.” Mason, however, has decades of firsthand experience with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Formerly employed by Amazon, he is now Vice President of Research and Development for education software company Intellus Learning.
Asked what the public’s biggest misconception of what AI is, Mason says, “They think that it exists at all, which it doesn’t. There are lots of cool applications that do things that are usually, in media and by their makers, described as ‘artificial intelligence.’ But they have nothing to do with how the mind works.”Mason is skeptical about how soon AI will have an immediate impact on consumers’ lives.
Mason is skeptical about how soon AI will have an immediate impact on consumers’ lives.”Automated cars will probably become ubiquitous. Recommendation systems will get ever better and extract ever more value from access to your attention. But I don’t see any radical, qualitative advances coming.”
“Automated cars will probably become ubiquitous. Recommendation systems will get ever better and extract ever more value from access to your attention. But I don’t see any radical, qualitative advances coming.”
What about ventures such as Neuralink, a company headed by Elon Musk, that recently announced its quest to develop brain/computer interface technology?
Reportedly, the ultimate goal would be a whole-brain interface, analogous to “neural lace,” a science fictional invention that allows a wireless brain-to-computer connection.
“It sounds awesome if he can get it to work,” Mason says. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be one of the early adopters.”
Any predictions of how interface technology might operate first require an understanding of how the brain works, Mason points out.
“People really don’t (know). It’s the most complex artifact known,” Mason says. “Hype notwithstanding, what neuroscientific research looks at these days is macroscopic functionality of gross brain regions and trying to understand the details of particular neurons. But as far as the overall information processing details, nobody has any real idea, and it seems very far away.”
As for Musk’s reported fear that AIs might take over the world, Mason says, “It’s utter nonsense. I think he’s seen too many science fiction movies.”
QUOTED: "Readers familiar with Greek mythology will appreciate Mason's mournful riffs highlighting the darker recesses of mythology."
Metamorphica
Publishers Weekly. 265.21 (May 21, 2018): p39.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Metamorphica
Zachary Mason. Farrar, Straus and Glroux, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-374-20864-6
Mason (Void Star) reworks Greek myths into mostly melancholic fragments in this impressive collection of flash fictions that accentuate the pain, frustrations, and regrets of well-known and unfamiliar myths. Each section centers loosely on a single god, showing the ways they debilitated successive family lines and interconnected figures. Athena's stories float around the edges of The Odyssey, capturing the bleak aftermath of the abandonment of Calypso and revenge of Ajax. The 25eus cycle follows Europas lineage, including Minos's section--a heartbreaking look at his belated anguish for mistreating his friend Daedalus. In the sections for Philemon and Baucis and Daphne, Mason rejects the characters' traditional transformations into trees to show deeper rewards and punishments. The strongest story of the Nemesis portion has a Clytemnestra bursting with her rage at the sacrifice of her daughter. Alcestis's section strips away the romance of a wife willing to die in place of her husband, Admetus. Mason mashes Gilgamesh and Theseus together and makes Atalanta a haughty lesbian. It's heavy but never plodding; readers familiar with Greek mythology will appreciate Mason's mournful riffs highlighting the darker recesses of mythology. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Metamorphica." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 39. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012564/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d53cad31. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012564
QUOTED: "Both soaring and deep, this dazzling narrative creates a fictional universe of myth that transcends time itself."
Mason, Zachary: METAMORPHICA
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mason, Zachary METAMORPHICA Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 10 ISBN: 978-0-374-20864-6
A computer scientist who earned literary renown with The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010), Mason shows that his novelistic debut was a warm-up for an even more ambitious reimagining of an epic work.
Where Odysseus unifies the earlier work (both in Homer and in Mason), Ovid's Metamorphoses and, necessarily, Mason's latest are more sprawling, introducing readers to the likes of Icarus, Midas, Orpheus, and Eurydice, many of whom narrate their own stories, with Mason adding the Roman author himself to the cast of characters. Ovid ends the book exiled from his homeland, his stories in shards, as "some trace their ancestry to the original, but all, by now, are corrupt, little more than florilegia of ghost stories, quotations out of context, fragments of geography. Through the incessant operation of chance some few have come to resemble their original, but there's no way to find them." Amid the loop of time and space, where years pass as waves and centuries are but an eye's blink, the only constant is change, as the title implies. Mason takes his opening epigram from Ovid--"Everything changes, nothing ends"--but later puts those words into the mouth of Dionysos in the dream of his friend Midas, who has transformed the world by introducing money. "I found that money had made the world as mutable as water," he muses. Within this literary world, the likes of Narcissus and Helen of Troy have interior lives, previously unexplored motives, and doubts, though as the cycle of myth proceeds toward its conclusion, the one thing that has never changed is Death, presented here as a friend or lover to some, an enemy to most others, but the fate for all. Amid the shape-shifting throughout this work, there's an immutable quality. "Faces are drawn in water, and names written in dust," according to the renewed mythos. "Even persons are ephemeral--in the end, there's only pattern."
Both soaring and deep, this dazzling narrative creates a fictional universe of myth that transcends time itself.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mason, Zachary: METAMORPHICA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571234/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e3b10ece. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571234
QUOTED: "a richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany."
Mason, Zachary: VOID STAR
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Mason, Zachary VOID STAR Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $27.00 4, 11 ISBN: 978-0-374-28506-7
Imaginative, intelligent vision of a future in which the machines we build take an unusual interest in us even as we seek to exploit them further.Dystopian fiction thrives on taking present facts and trends and extrapolating them into the future, making the bad even worse. Mason (The Lost Books of the Odyssey, 2010) fully honors this genre convention. Are the ice caps melting? Fine: a century or so from now, let's put New York underwater, make an archipelago of San Francisco, a glittering city of towers that is "remote, incorruptible, a place outside of time." Is inequality rising? Then we'll have a world in which the rich live entirely apart from the poor, who in turn inhabit Rio-style favelas in the hell that is Los Angeles--and most of the rest of the world, for that matter. In this future, AI algorithms are almost ready to emerge into full consciousness, and when they do, humans won't much matter. Enter Irina, an intermediary with an implanted memory who can interpret bots to humans and vice versa. Her employer, a super-tycoon named Cromwell, wants nothing more than to live forever, though he is already "approaching the limit of what life extension can do." AI might be of help there, though even the wealthiest and most capable of Mason's characters--including a Brazilian heir to a fortune and a brilliant though bent-toward-bad intellectual--are having trouble figuring out why the avatars and disembodied voices of the machines are misbehaving so. Cromwell also wants what's inside Irina's brain, which she has to put to good use escaping the many traps he lays for her, helped along by a growing insurrection among the have-nots. Parts of the book are overwritten, and the many threads of the storyline show a bare patch here and there, but in the main, Mason's story makes a fine ode to freedom of thought and being in an oppressive time. A richly rewarding blend of noir thriller and sci-fi in the best tradition of Dick, Stephenson, and Delany.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Mason, Zachary: VOID STAR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002699/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=95b61ae3. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002699
QUOTED: "The book is not for the casual reader looking for a quick, light read."
Void Star
Dawn Kuczwara
Booklist. 113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Void Star. By Zachary Mason. Apr. 2017. 400p. Farrar, 527 (9780374285067).
In Mason's sophomore effort, he jumps slightly forward in time instead of far back, as he did in his first book, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007). In this near-future work, he teases forth the story of three very different characters--Kern, a scrappy refugee clawing a living from within the favelas of San Francisco; Irina, who uses her artificial-memory implants to fuel her entrepreneurial efforts, which in turn pay for the expensive treatments to keep her young looking; and Thales, the mathematical-genius child of a Brazilian political overlord, forced to flee his home country when his father is killed. Mason's prose takes on the meandering, sometimes disconnected form that our own thoughts take as we move through our days. With its present-tense form and word choices that raise the bar on the text but will prove challenging for some readers, the book is not for the casual reader looking for a quick, light read. Readers who enjoy Cormac McCarthy and China Mieville but wished they had had more influence from Neal Stephenson might find this book is just what they're looking for.--Dawn Kuczwara
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kuczwara, Dawn. "Void Star." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485442548/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dc703530. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442548
QUOTED: "a complex and spellbinding tale of a future where self-preservation, in every sense of the word, is a victory."
Mason, Zachary. Void Star
Lawrence Rungren
Library Journal. 142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p82.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Mason, Zachary. Void Star. Farrar. Apr. 2017.400p. ISBN 9780374285067. $27; ebk. ISBN 9780374709822. F
In this technothriller, set in a not-too-distant, postapocalyptic future, coastal cities have been submerged, growing income disparities have led to masses living in drone-built ghettos, Als programmed and maintained by shadowy forces are seemingly in charge, and cures for aging are available for those who can afford them. Among this world's inhabitants is Irina, a contractor whose brain implant gives her a prodigious memory and the ability to act as an intermediary between her various employers and the Als. Her talents bring her to the attention of Cromwell, a rapacious tech baron with a benign image who wishes to use her abilities--and her memories--to further his own ends. Meanwhile, Kem, a ghetto dweller, martial arts devotee, and small-time thief, is being pursued by thugs after he steals an unusual cell phone. And the mathematically-minded Thales, son of the Brazilian prime minister, helps Irina take on an all-powerful AI known as Cloudbreaker, with the assistance of Akemi, a Japanese actress, in the novel's ultimate confrontation. VERDICT Mason's follow-up to The Lost Books of the Odyssey is a complex and spellbinding tale of a future where self-preservation, in every sense of the word, is a victory. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Rungren, Lawrence
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rungren, Lawrence. "Mason, Zachary. Void Star." Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 82. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A481649084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=410ff2af. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481649084
QUOTED: "Patient readers who persist through the excessive layers of description will be rewarded with a vivid story."
Void Star
Publishers Weekly. 264.7 (Feb. 13, 2017): p44+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Void Star
Zachary Mason. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-0-374-28506-7
Mason portrays late-22nd-century Earth as a dark and desperate world populated by drones, slums, rising tides, longevity treatments, and artificial intelligence. His fleeting images of harsh cityscapes in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Thailand evoke an inhuman coldness. Three characters unwittingly take part in a globe-spanning scheme to stop a powerful AI that hijacks people with memory implants to interpret the world for it. Thales, the son of a Brazilian politician, receives such an implant after surviving an assassination attempt. Irina Sunden uses her implant to link with AIs and learn how they think. Street fighter Kern, from the favelas, steals the wrong phone. When Irina finds computer code in city graffiti, she links with Akemi, a ghost woman trapped in an AI, the voice on the other end of Kern's phone. Together they help Irina contact the powerful Cloudbreaker AI and get revenge on Cromwell, a wealthy recluse who wants Irina's memories. Patient readers who persist through the excessive layers of description will be rewarded with a vivid story, complete with a chilling and satisfying ending. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Void Star." Publishers Weekly, 13 Feb. 2017, p. 44+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482198134/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=73152c0f. Accessed 10 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482198134
QUOTED: "It is an enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage."
"There is a slightly creaky habit whereby, when the author wants to mention some nice detail, a character will helpfully 'think of' the relevant expository material. But Void Star’s larger drawback is that, as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract."
Science fiction books
Void Star by Zachary Mason review – a techno-thriller with literary ambitions
Virtual hallucinations and tricksy Matrix-style visions dominate a 21st-century immortality quest
Steven Poole
Wed 26 Apr 2017 14.00 BST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.43 GMT
‘Spectacular but oddly airless Matrix-style visions.’ Photograph: Colin Anderson/Getty Images/Blend Images
I
t’s late in the 21st century. New York City has drowned, and the reversal of Pacific currents means that Tokyo is freezing. In Saudi Arabia “the mullahs rule piously over blank infernos of sand”. There are armed drones and super-powerful AIs that have been designed for thousands of generations by other AIs, so that no human understands how they work. The rich have private armies and undergo yearly rejuvenation treat-ments at exclusive clinics. But James Cromwell, an inscrutable billionaire already more than 100 years old, wants more time. And someone unknown has sent him proof of a concept for an elixir of immortality. The question is, what does this party want in return?
The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason
Read more
The novel’s main character is Irina, a freelance AI-whisperer who is among the few humans who can even vaguely communicate with the computer minds, and who is hired by Cromwell for reasons unclear. Meanwhile Kern, a streetfighter who lives in the favelas that have grown up around LA, is tasked with stealing a phone, and a character called Thales awaits the deterioration of his mind owing to a failing memory implant. Thus set up, the story proceeds by way of short chapters that alternate between the various characters’ points of view. Suspense is generated by the question of how their different trajectories will intersect, or whether they are already doing so under our noses.
Advertisement
Void Star is the follow-up to Zachary Mason’s more original debut The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a series of Borgesian riffs on Homer. It is an enjoyably driving techno-thriller with literary ambition, and as such it may be read as being in close dialogue with the work of SF demigod William Gibson, admirers of whom may see in this novel a lot of influence, even outright homage.
Gibson, coiner of the word “cyberspace”, developed a telegraphically hallucinatory prose to describe his hero’s visions on jacking in to the network: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Similarly, here is Mason’s Irina, encountering a huge AI in virtual space: “Sense of rushing over the sea at dawn, and then the paper-lantern glow of the glass and steel towers of a city rising from the waves …” Like Gibson, Mason is also fond of the verbless accumulation of sensory detail. Irina’s intuitive cool recalls that of Cayce Pollard, heroine of Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. (Like Irina, Cayce also has an enigmatic super-rich employer-slash-adversary, the splendidly named Hubertus Bigend.)
Void Star’s particular tricksiness lies in its not revealing when some apparently physical location might be a virtual hallucination — and even when some apparently real characters are just memory reconstructions running on computers, unbeknown to themselves or the reader. This is clever, but sometimes feels cheap: a character will die dramatically, only for it to turn out that it was just a copy running as a disposable subroutine, and that the real person is still alive.
Sensory detail … Zachary Mason. Photograph: Kai Parviainen/Macmillan
A character will die dramatically, only for it to turn out that it was just a copy running as a disposable subroutine
In the novel’s real world, however, there are many moments to savour. There are fights and shootouts and the occasional flash of sardonic nerd comedy. (A bartender on a Thai beach is “your basic sun-ravaged vegan in a coral necklace”.) Irina’s agent, Maya, is lovingly foul-mouthed; there is a philosophical Japanese gangster called Hiro who quotes Quentin Tarantino, and a satisfyingly laconic English mercenary.There are clever hacking tricks with soldiers’ hi-tech power armour, and there is a Japanese swordfighting tournament called Final Sword in which contestants are often killed in the ring. (The tournament doctors proudly announce: “We are one hundred per cent committed to saving the combatants’ lives, with a success rate in excess of 40 per cent!”)
The novel’s most vivid character is Kern, who has a monastic devotion to Thai boxing and an almost total worldly innocence. A nitpicker might have wished that Irina spent less time musing about the experience of being in an airport, with no insights that would not occur to any early 21st-century novelist, or even to Alain de Botton. And there is a slightly creaky habit whereby, when the author wants to mention some nice detail, a character will helpfully “think of” the relevant expository material.
Advertisement
But Void Star’s larger drawback is that, as its storylines converge in virtual spaces, everything begins to seem ethereally confusing and abstract. At one point, a character has this revealingly unrevealing vision: “It’s pure structure, what he’s found, and somehow mathematical, but he finds he can’t articulate it …” Nor can the novel, for all its often spectacular but oddly airless Matrix-style visions. At least until it returns, in the most satisfying of the various characters’ endings, to the physical realities of fire and steel.
• Void Star is published by Cape. To order a copy for £15.29 (RRP £17.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "Metamorphica is an interesting and curious piece of writing, but will probably speak to only a very select amount of people. If your idea of a literary good time involves John Grisham or Stephen King, you will probably want to stay far away from this one. If not, cross yourself and dive in and see if you can make heads or tails of what’s really going on here."
Zachary HouleFollow
Book critic, Fiction author, Poet, Writer, Editor. Follow me on Twitter @zachary_houle.
Aug 6
Zachary Mason
A Review of Zachary Mason’s “Metamorphica”
It’s All Greek to Me
“Metamorphica” Book Cover
What seems to be a new trend among authors is taking stories that are in the public domain and rewriting them with a modern sensibility. Daniel Mallory Ortberg did it a few months ago with his book The Merry Spinster, which refashioned old fairy tales with new twists on them. Now, Zachary Mason has turned in a book based on old Greek mythology and the writing of Ovid called Metamorphica. It’s not the first time he has done such a thing — his earlier book, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, was based off Homer’s epic. So what is Metamorphica like? Well, while it isn’t a “difficult” read, per se, one that you’ll need an English Ph.D. and some knowledge of Greek history to really understand it (though it may help), this book, which is based off of Ovid’s epic poem the Metamorphoses, misses the mark more than it hits it.
Essentially, these retellings envision a dour reading of Ovid’s work. Rather than being something that is heroic, Metamorphica looks at the downside of being a God or a war hero, and that very often is the loneliness and desolation that being someone of import can bring. I don’t think this is the point of the book, but I imagined the stories of Metamorphica being transposed on the current state of American politics, and acting as more of a paean to a once great nation state being reduced to rubble after foolish wars and Trump-like politicking. Aside from that, the book of interlinked short stories, some 50 or so of them, didn’t make much sense to me at all. What is the author really trying to do here? Is this some kind of magic card trick? Or is it just a rewriting exercise with not much meat to it? I guess you’ll have to decide by reading this yourself.
I found that many of the stories read like fragments or shards, and didn’t really go anywhere. I thus found the longer stories to generally have more meat to them, though they, too, tend to drone on and on about the same type of subject matter — the kinds of things that an editor’s pen may have been helpful to bring to them. I think my favourite story in the bunch is the one where Mino loses his friend Daedalus, which might be something of an allegory for how the U.S. is currently alienating all of its allies. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into these stories?
Otherwise, these are tales of woe about heroes and legends losing their way in the world, of becoming isolated and cast off from the rest of society. Perhaps this is a comment on how Greek mythology and classic literature as a whole has been constrained to academia mostly. However, the thing is that Metamorphica is mostly a book that will be of interest to academics only, really. There isn’t much that a casual reader would grasp on to, and you can bet that you probably won’t be taking this work of fiction to the beach with you. (Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but I’m just sayin’.) All in all, these stories tended to blend into each other without much sense.
What’s particularly baffling is the inclusion of star charts at the beginning of each section. The book doesn’t do an adequate job of explaining what these constellations had to do with each other or the book as a whole. Again, having a little bit of knowledge about astronomy and how it connects with Greek literature would be useful. As you can probably see by now, the audience that’s intended for Metamorphica seems very small and rarefied indeed. This probably goes a long way towards saying that this book wasn’t really meant for me, and it would probably be best enjoyed by students of Ovid.
What I can say that’s nice and positive is that the book is well penned. Despite the alternatively under and overlength of these stories, you get a feel for the original author and the writing is not so poetic that it is unintelligible to only just a select few. You get a sense of the desolation and tiredness that constant war brings to a people. You also get a sense that these gods and heroes are just as ordinary as you and me. Overall, though, the effect is tiresome. It is as though Mason simply had the same thing to say about each character, and just hits the same plaintive note over and over again 50 or so times. That said, I did like the little mini-introductions to each character being written about at the start of each piece as context as I have to admit that I’ve read zero Ovid lately. Still, how the stories then unspool can be opposite in terms of how they’re introduced, which introduces some level of confusion as to how fast and loose Mason is playing with the “history” of these characters.
In the end, there was a lot about this book that flew straight over my head, I think. If the intent was to modernize classic literature, Mason certainly takes his liberties with it — consult the notes section at the end of the book as proof. If the intent was something else entirely, then I’m at a loss to explain what it is — unless, of course, I’m right about these pieces speaking to today’s political climate. Basically, Metamorphica is an interesting and curious piece of writing, but will probably speak to only a very select amount of people. If your idea of a literary good time involves John Grisham or Stephen King, you will probably want to stay far away from this one. If not, cross yourself and dive in and see if you can make heads or tails of what’s really going on here. I know I’m not sure I could, and I consider myself as well read. Take that as you will and then decide accordingly as to whether or not Metamorphica is a book worth reading. Me? I think I’m going to read a more summery read that’s easier to parse next.
Zachary Mason’s Metamorphica was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 10, 2018.
Image
Zachary Mason
Credit
Kai Parviainen
Buy Book ▾
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.
By Emily Wilson
Aug. 3, 2018
METAMORPHICA
By Zachary Mason
282 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
We are living in an age of great cultural interest in ancient myths, including TV dramas (“Troy: Fall of a City”), literary retellings (Neil Gaiman’s compelling “Norse Mythology”), novels that reinvent myth in a modern context (Kamila Shamsie’s brilliant “Home Fire”) and novels set in the classical past (Madeline Miller’s moving “Circe”). In times of sweeping change, myths provide a way of thinking about big questions like transformation, power, agency and responsibility, and these ancient stories have the great advantage, in a polarized, partisan age, of being ecumenical: They belong to none of us, and to us all.
For Zachary Mason, a computer scientist as well as the author of three works of fiction, ancient myth is an opportunity to explore the emptiness of life and the infinite variety of narrative. His last book, “The Lost Books of the Odyssey,” was a sequence of cleverly Borgesian short stories that imagined variations within the framework of the Homeric poem.
The title of his new work, “Metamorphica,” nods to Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” and Ovid bookends the collection. In the first story Ovid begs to trade “anything, everything” for literary immortality. The final piece returns to Ovid, now in exile on the Black Sea, writing a letter to Emperor Augustus to plead for a repeal of his sentence. The letter gets soiled, slashed, mildewed and translated into multiple languages, until the “false and worthless letters are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert.” None reach within even a thousand miles of Rome, where, in any case, the emperor would probably not open them. The piece is a fable about bad postal service and the difficulties of communicating before email and video chat. But it also offers one of many variations on Mason’s central theme: Where we may expect to find meaning, there is none. The lesson can feel profound or sophomoric, depending on how much patience you have for this kind of thing.
Image
Mason takes the memorable female characters of classical myth — goddesses, prophets, rape victims, noble heroines, killers of family members, witches, Amazons, adulteresses and athletes — and turns them into ciphers. He reduces the number of rapes; Persephone, Daphne and Thetis, for example, are willing participants in their liaisons. But he also reduces female agency to more or less nothing. Helen is a phantom, alienated from her own story. Daphne is not an emblem of poetic inspiration, but “an ordinarily pretty girl,” replicated throughout eternity as an endless sequence of equally ordinary pretty girls. Eurydice, the beloved of Orpheus, is “less a lover than a trope of literature.” Clytemnestra’s triumphant slaughter of her daughter-killing husband “fades into nothing.” Athena, a terrifying military goddess, becomes a needy girl with a crush on Odysseus.
Advertisement
Mason’s male characters live almost equally meaningless lives, although they have a somewhat wider set of interests and exercise their own power through poetry, close male friendships and (always heterosexual) sex. As in Ovid, Zeus is a serial rapist, and Mason provides disturbingly lyrical descriptions of his abusive pleasure (“her will dissolves like a sandbank in the tide”). But even rape fails to give Zeus’ life meaning. When another version of Athena robs and challenges him, he manages only to substitute one kind of frustration for another.
You have 3 free articles remaining.
Subscribe to The Times
Mason’s twist on the story of Midas reminds us that money has no fixed meaning or value. Midas becomes the inventor of money, “a necessary myth for our time”: After the loss of his friend, Dionysos, he melts down his family’s treasures into coinage, and in so doing, erases history and memory. In the ancient version of the myth, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great retelling, “The Golden Touch,” there is an insistence that some things — like eating and drinking, and the people we love — might be incommensurate with money. Mason eliminates this thread, along with more or less every element in the body of Greco-Roman myth that smacks of ethics, or suggests that anything we do matters.
Death is a common theme, and death is usually not scary but void. When Zeus takes the islands, and Poseidon the seas around them, Death plays the winning card: He claims “the emptiness within them.” Elysium, the place of bliss provided for warriors after death, becomes an infinite series of rock pools in which Menelaus, husband of Helen, can collect and catalog mollusks with only a vague “intuition for an order” that might one day emerge; the work shields him from the pain of death and from his wife, who has “never been kind.” The Greek myths, in Mason’s hands, are like those mollusks: a vast set of items to collect and catalog, offering glimpses of a pattern, and a bleakly comforting escape from the world of feelings and human beings.
EDITORS’ PICKS
‘Too Little Too Late’: Older Americans Are Facing Bankruptcy
Love Filled Their Trip. On Day 369, ISIS Struck.
This Is the Way Paul Ryan’s Speakership Ends
Emily Wilson is a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania. Her translation of “The Odyssey” will be published in paperback this November.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
QUOTED: "Mason once again displays his ability to transform classical creations into a tale that is distinctly his own."
Metamorphica.
Mason, Zachary (author).
July 2018. 304p. Farrar, hardcover, $26 (9780374208646).
REVIEW. First published June 14, 2018 (Booklist Online).
In his debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010), Mason, a computer scientist, reimagined The Odyssey; in this follow-up, he once again offers variations on classical myths. Inspired by and expanding upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Mason uses the classical names given to constellations to structure brief explorations of numerous Greek and Roman figures, such as Minos, Theseus, Odysseus, Atalanta, and Apollo. Like the ancient texts he is inspired by, Mason humanizes each figure, whether godly or mortal, often using a first-person perspective to inhabit their personal struggles and relationships with other characters. Although he does orient the reader with a brief introduction to each character, some familiarity with these myths is helpful, particularly in order to appreciate his changes. A fractured, multilayered text reminiscent of Alan Lightman’s classic Einstein’s Dreams (1992) and similar to Madeline Miller’s similarly themed Song of Achilles (2012), Mason’s novel is written in beautiful prose that almost reads like blank verse. Mason once again displays his ability to transform classical creations into a tale that is distinctly his own.— Alexander Moran