What purer pleasure in the month of December than finding a new book that you can’t stop reading? I love S. L. Huang’s short fiction, and was thrilled that her formerly self-published Zero Sum Game got a reissue with Tor this year. It absolutely lived up to my internally generated hype.
Cas Russell is a math genius such that she can calculate the bolt depth and wall strength of bars on windows in an instant, and apply leverage in exactly the right spot to pry them off. She’s a math genius such that she can dodge bullets by predicting their speed and vector and uh, other? math? words? But the job she’s taken on, rescuing a young woman called Courtney from a drug cartel she’s working for, is turning into something much bigger than she’d bargained for. Along with her only friend, who is a psychopath and not her friend, and a PI she has just met and barely trusts, Cas finds herself taking on a vast and shadowy organization with fingers in more pies than any of them can imagine.
If you are a fan of the thing where all the other characters constantly say “Cas no” and Cas thinks it over very seriously and then screams “Cas yes” and dedicates her life to overthrowing an all-powerful all-knowing international conglomerate that can litrally control your mind, Zero Sum Game has you covered. It’s the best kind of destroying-an-international-conglomerate story, where unimportant characters whiz past you at breakneck speed, and only later does Cas realize those people had all the answers. Had she but known. Had everyone but known!
Cas’s math genius giving her superpowers might have felt gimmicky if not for Huang’s obvious knowledge of both math and superpowers. (I realize that I am tacitly taking the position that stuntpeople have superpowers; this is what I truly believe.) Cas’s powers mean that she’s nearly immune to physical threats, which is so restful and pleasant, but the book still finds ways to put her in danger — and not always just by numerically overwhelming her. Despite her very very accurate risk calculation, she doesn’t always have the information she needs. Some situations turn out badly.
More than any of that, I just couldn’t stop reading this book. Though SL Huang, a superpowered individual herself, will not understand this lazy-person metric, I will tell you that I did stair-running for the first time in weeks because I had Zero Sum Game to get me through it; and it’s the first time in months I did stair-running while reading anything other than an old favorite.1 It’s that engaging. I am chomping at the bit for the sequel.
I have only two caveats about this book, and neither of them applies to me, which is probably why I loved it so much. First of all, Cas is not a woman who feels a great deal of remorse. Halfway through the book she gets accused of killing people as a first line of defense for all her problems. If you can’t live with a protagonist of whom this is true, Zero Sum Game may not be your book. Also, Zero Sum Game is the first in a series, which means that a lot of broader-strokes questions remain unanswered at the end of it. Caveat lector. As for me, I’m just excited I get to spend more time in this world.
- Yes, I read while running on stairs. I run up and down my own stairs at home. Please do not tell this to SL Huang, as it is risible even to regular humans, let alone ones with superpowers. ↩