Friday, January 24, 2020

Short Book Reviews: Math Genius and the Disappointing Sequel

Null Set, A Cas Russell Novel, by S. L. Huang (Tor)


I loved S. L. Huang’s Zero Sum Game, and Cas Russell, whose superpower is her ability to make lightning-fast mathematical calculations. She works at such irregular and occasionally dubiously legal jobs as tracking down missing persons, and enjoys an uneasy but devoted friendship with psychopath, Rio. At the end of the first book, a world-wide mind-control conspiracy had been defeated after many struggles and reversals. Null Set picks up where Zero Sum Game left off, with Cas and her gang facing rising gang violence, the result of eliminating the aforementioned mind control, and she herself beset by newly resurfacing memories of a previous personality, and a telepath bent on trying to help her before whatever was done to her to give her those memories kills her. Confused? So was I, for much of the story.

Alas, Null Set feels like either a sequel that author hadn’t planned on or the flabby middle book of a series. Cas spends way too much time agonizing over this or that, tormented by fragmentary memories, unwilling to ask her devoted friends for help, and in general not accomplishing much. When she hits upon a solution to the looming gang war, she only ends up having to undo it because if people are now unable to feed off each other’s anger, they are equally immune to sharing hope. Suicide and addiction rates skyrocket. I found myself wondering what the point of it was, since we would end up right back where we started.

It felt as if the ideas and plot of a novella or maybe an even shorter novelette got stretched out into novel length. I’d loved feisty, independent Cas in the first book, but now found her indecision, unwillingness to trust anyone, and general crankiness annoying. Even her very cool mathematical genius couldn’t compensate for the loss of sympathy as a character. There’s supposed to be a third book, but I think I’ll skip it and consider Zero Sum Game as a nice, tidy stand-alone.

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