Zero Sum Game, by S. L. Huang

[mrissa]

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Math is nearly everything to Cas. It's her solace when her mind is too loud, her means of making a living (albeit somewhat unconventionally), her identity, her core. The closer she can come to articulating axioms for individual people, the more comfortable she is dealing with them.

Which is good, because comfortable is in pretty short supply in this book otherwise.

Cas's life is violently efficient retrieval services. She associates with people who have even more violence in their worlds--most notably Rio, a psychopath kept on the rails with a strong moral code external to his sense of self. But the situation she falls into at the beginning of Zero Sum Game is an even more dangerous one than she's used to--not just in its violence but in its dangers to her own brain.

This is a fast-paced thriller with some clever twists and an uneasy resolution and a few math jokes along the way.

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Comments

[davidgillon]

I read this in its initial self-published release*, Cas Russell is a really gripping character and the action scenes are amongst the best I've read. Imagine someone with autistic savant like skills (though Cas isn't an autistic savant) applied specifically to the mathematics of bodily movement (with a sideline in ballistics). I wasn't surprised to find out SL Huang has worked as a stuntwoman on top of being an MIT maths grad.

There's one or two things I had a problem with, Cas's skills at times exceed the physical limitations of her weapons, but Huang largely pulls it off.

*Which was self-publishing done right, I didn't realise it was self-published until much later