Monday, November 5, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Zero Sum Game by SL Huang



Zero Sum Game is a thriller that was first self-published in 2014 and was just re-released in an edited-version by Tor Books (which is also planning on releasing at least the first three books in the series).  Given the amount of my favorite authors recommending the book - the book contains blurbs by Ken Liu, Kate Elliott, Yoon Ha Lee, and Chuck Wendig, among others - I reserved it as a physical book from my local library as soon as I saw it was available.*

*Note: My Local e-Library had available for permanent loan - as it was published under a Creative Commons license - the old 2014 version of this book.  I haven't checked the differences between them, but I know one review noted the older version was less polished, so this review applies entirely to the updated release.  

And it did not disappoint. Zero Sum Games is a hell of a scifi thriller, featuring a heroine who is pretty damn awesome and whose superpower is being insanely good at using math, not just on paper but in real time, allowing her to instantly essentially calculate the best way out/forward in any situation.  Of course, it helps that this power only complements her ability to be a fascinating action hero, and that the villain she faces in this book is a great antagonist for her abilities, creating an incredibly fast-paced plot that is highly unpredictable and incredibly fun.


--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------------
Cas Russell is known in the world's underground as an expert retriever - hire her to retrieve an object, or on rare occasion - a person, and it's as good as done, no matter who's guarding it.  Unknown to the world is that she's able to do this because of her insane mathematical ability, which allows her to perform inhuman feats such as dodging bullets or hurling found objects at disastrous velocities/trajectories to take people down, simply through the ability to work through calculations at an instant's notice.  Cas is a loner really, with some of her only "friends" being a few intel guys and an incredibly deadly psychopath constrained only by his belief in god.

But when Cas takes a mission to rescue a young woman from a drug cartel, Cas finds herself in a mess she could never have anticipated, and up against a threat she could not possibly have imagined.  For while Cas can calculate practically every option in a given situation, she needs to know the realities of the world around her in order to make those calculations....and the threat seems to have the ability to alter peoples' minds.  This threat has its tendrils in the entire world...and Cas can't ignore it once she's found it.

But can Cas really find a way to take down this threat, when her calculations are thrown off by the terror that her own thoughts are no longer her own?
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It would be so easy for the powers of Zero Sum Game's heroine and villain to seem rather comical in other hands - after all our protagonist has the ability to use math calculations to basically do almost anything (in one of her early feats in this book, she uses a pistol to shoot out the bolts holding in place bars in a window, jumps up to that level, drops her gun while she's in the air, and steps on the gun at a precise angle to use the gun as a lever to displace the now unfastened bars so she can get in).  And our villain is a crazy powerful telepath who might seem overpowered in the setting of the X-Men, nevertheless in this more grounded reality.

And yet, Huang makes this not only work, but work incredibly damn well.  It helps that Cas is just a phenomenal first person narrator who is incredibly easy to root for - she's quite sociopathic but is still cares for things and people enough to be lovable, and her ability to perform impossible stunts...and to recognize when she can't makes her rather fun to read about what's going to happen next.  And again, her personality is great, even if it's maybe a bit tropish how she comes to trust and befriend the character who winds up being her partner as the book goes on.  The side characters are strong as well - whether that be the psychopathic Rio, PI Tresting, or super-hacker Checker (Checker is particularly great, and hopefully will have a larger role in the next book).  And the villain is done well enough, and is just not-overpowered enough to never seem cartoony, while at the same time remaining incredibly chilling.

And man is this book incredibly fast paced.  It's just over 300 pages in the hardcover, and I never wanted to put it down, because something new would happen at any given moment.  I've complained in the past that some stories need moments to breathe or they don't work, but that's never the case here, where events move fast fast fast, and are always incredibly damn thrilling.  If I have one complaint, it's that the ending isn't really satisfying because while this story is resolved, it leaves what is essentially a massive cliffhanger, but the book is so great otherwise that I don't mind too much.

So yeah, I'll be in for the new version of Book 2 (which by the description seems instead to be the old Book 4?) coming out next summer.  It'll be hard to wait until then damnit.
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