Praise for Fabrications : A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026 "Zachary Mason wrote one of my favorite novels about AI, and now he is back. In Fabrications , Mason, an author and computer scientist, imagines a near future shaped by artificial intelligences that are benevolent, needy and not quite human, but not quite machine. Told from the perspectives of these uncanny beings as they mediate memory, nature and human grief, these stories reveal a world at once strange and disturbingly plausible, an exploration of the AI mind. Fabrications is a Borges- and Calvino-inflected work of speculative fiction about a world we might inhabit sooner than we think."-- Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators "An outstanding collection. Fabrications captures its highly intelligent narrators with great astuteness and nuance, drawing thrilling stories out of ''alien'' minds. Mason''s work feels more pertinent than ever in our fast-advancing future."-- Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Coldwire "Why worry about algorithms stealing our voices and our styles when humans can pilfer theirs? Fabrications is a dazzling feat of invention.
In the uncanny voices of algorithmic agents across a range of settings--a drug lord''s AI sidekick convinced it''s the Mayan goddess of death, the rogue AI companion of a hedge fund billionaire--Zachary Mason spins stories that dazzle with their brilliance and craft. Though addressing one another and their flesh-and-blood counterparts with cold precision, the nonhuman beings conjured in these stories come to life in startlingly human ways."-- Bruce Holsinger, bestselling author of The Displacements and Culpability "A startlingly compassionate look at the intimacies between humans and machines. Mason grasps not just the scientific but also the emotional possibilities of the world we''re racing to build--a world full of strange intelligences living out digital lives alongside us. They are funny, frightening, and willful. Their surprising ways of thinking will change yours."-- Alex Foster, author of Circular Motion Praise for The Lost Books of the Odyssey : A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editors'' Choice Finalist for the 2008 New York Public Library''s Young Lions Award "An ingeniously Borgesian novel that''s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive . This is a book that 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.
"-- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Mason''s prose is finely wrought . His imagination soars and his language delights."-- Adam Mansbach, New York Times Book Review "Clever, compelling, and often poignant . Mason''s puckishly archaic diction, a wiseacre''s revision of Richmond Lattimore with swing and jazz, is such a pleasure."-- Jesse Berrett, San Francisco Chronicle "Marvelous . The stories'' wonderful variety reflects the cunning, resourceful character of Odysseus himself."-- Timothy Farrington, Wall Street Journal "Jubilant in execution. Perverse and irreverent.
"-- Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe "An absolute delight."-- Alan Cheuse, NPR''s All Things Considered "A subtle, inventive, and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls ''the drunkenness of things being various.''"-- John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea "Spellbinding. In his versions of these ancient myths, Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself. Rarely is it so reassuring to be in the hands of such an unreliable narrator."-- Simon Armitage, author of The Odyssey: A Dramatic Retelling of Homer''s Epic Praise for Metamorphica : " Metamorphica is a joy of a book. Mason understands beautifully that traditions are most powerful in their reinvention.
Beyond their tremendous lyricism and admirable control, these retellings of Mediterranean myth offer the truest pleasure of all fiction, its immense possibility. Metamorphica brims with imagination and an astonishing empathy that reminds us that even the most ancient of legends can feel urgent to us today, if only we would just listen."-- Kanish Tharoor, author of Swimmer Among the Stars "Lush and very smart . the stories throb with tragedy, transformation, and wars."-- JR Ramakrishnan, Electric Literature "[An] impressive collection of flash fictions that accentuate the pain, frustrations, and regrets of well-known and unfamiliar myths."-- Publishers Weekly Praise for Void Star : "[Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty."-- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Elegant . written with the syntactic precision you might expect from a linguist, a computer scientist, a mathematician.
Or a person who is all three."-- Charley Locke, Wired "Speculative fiction has long wrestled with . ethical quandaries, but rarely has it done so with the power of language and prescience found in Void Star . Mason''s prose is prodigious in scope and exultant."-- Hayden Robel, Zyzzyva "Readers who enjoy Cormac McCarthy and China Miéville but wished they had had more influence from Neal Stephenson might find this book is just what they''re looking for."-- Dawn Kuczwara, Booklist " Void Star is an extraordinary novel. The hallucinatory beauty of the prose is matched only by the book''s velocity and mystery, and the storyof mortality, memory, and what it means to be humanholds all the force and power of mythology."-- Emily St.
John Mandel, author of Station Eleven.