Zachary Mason

A riveting, beautifully written, fugue-like novel of AIs, memory, violence, and mortality Not far in the future the seas have risen and the central latitudes are emptying, but it’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’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’s a good gig, paying enough for the annual visits to the Mayo Clinic that keep her from aging. Kern 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 is from a different world entirely—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. 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’s screen in her employer’s eyeglasses. None are safe as they’re pushed together by subtle forces that stay just out of sight. Vivid, tumultuous, and propulsive, Void Star is Zachary Mason’s mind-bending follow-up to his bestselling debut, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

A Novel

Void Star

Following the structure of the ancient Greek classic, The Lost Books of the Odyssey features alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original Odyssey and, equipped as well with a faux-authoritative scholarly introduction, richly carries off the illusion of being the lost ur-text of Homer's masterpiece.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey

In the tradition of Zachary Mason's bestselling first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey - where he recast episodes from Homer's masterpiece - Metamorphica now reimagines Ovid's epic poem of endless transformation, Metamorphoses. Just as the Roman poet reinvigorated the Greek Classical legends 700 years after Homer, so Mason now gives us a radical and exciting renovation of those myths, 2,000 years after Ovid. It retells the great stories of Narcissus, Orpheus, Persephone, Icarus, Midas, Medea and Actaeon, and strings them together like the stars in constellations - with even Ovid himself entering the narrative. It's as though the ancient mythologies had been rewritten by Borges or Calvino - or artificial intelligence - and brought glimmering back into our world. Metamorphica re-engages with the elemental power of the ancient shape-changing gods by keeping their essences while rewriting their stories. It is this extraordinary narrative approach that is so thrilling; we watch as the author extracts more and more out of the original legend - adding infinite perspectives to narratives we thought we knew. Mason understands that the great myths are parables - always in flux, always relevant - always throwing shards of light from the morning of the world.

Metamorphica

Odysseia'nın Kayıp Bölümleri

"Malgré toute la complexité de l'Odyssée, une poignée d'images en forme le centre - navires noirs tirés sur une plage blanche, un ogre cannibale gardant l'entrée d'une grotte, un homme parcourant une mer sans amers en quête d'une maison qui l'a oublié. Il y a presque trois millénaires, ces images, dans un certain ordre, se sont cristallisées pour former l'Odyssée telle que nous la connaissons, mais avant cela le matériau homérique était sans forme, fluide, ses éléments battus comme un jeu de cartes." Dans un roman qui se donne comme la traduction d'un papyrus retrouvé lors de fouilles dans la région d'Oxyrhynque, Zachary Mason compose quarante-quatre variations concises de l'histoire d'Ulysse. En vérité, le papyrus prétexte et sa traduction fantasmée sembleraient plutôt exhumés des papiers d'un Borges ou arrachés aux premières es-quisses des Villes invisibles de Calvino. "Les personnages familiers y sont arrangés selon de nouveaux tableaux, mais ne tardent pas à être pris d'indocilité, de versatilité - ils tournent le dos, oublient leurs noms, se déplacent." Magnifiques d'imagination et d'une poésie rare, Les Chants perdus de l'Odyssée n'en finissent pas d'inventer des romans possibles.

Les chants perdus de l'Odyssée

Es könnte auch alles ganz anders gewesen sein: Odysseus entscheidet sich gegen den Bau des Trojanischen Pferdes; Polyphem, der bösartige Zyklop, ist ein sanftmütiger Riese; Penelope, des Wartens müde, hat längst einen anderen geheiratet oder aber: Als der Held endlich im heimatlichen Ithaka angekommen ist, langweilt er sich bald so sehr, daß er erneut die Segel hißt ... In seinem hochgelobten Debütroman erfindet Zachary Mason Homers Epos vom listenreichen Odysseus und seinen Irrfahrten ganz neu. Spielerisch packt Mason den Klassiker, stellt ihn auf den Kopf und präsentiert einen frischen, zeitgenössischen Roman über die Reise eines Mannes zu sich selbst. Und schafft dabei mit leichter Hand die Illusion, daß dieses Buch der verlorengegangene Urtext von Homers Meisterwerk sein könnte. Mason ist ein wunderbar amüsantes, kluges und wagemutiges Buch gelungen, das den postmodernen Erzählungen von Jorge Luis Borges und Italo Calvino in nichts nachsteht.

Zachary Mason

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