It’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 | Book review 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.

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.

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.