Fabrications
By Zachary Mason
Grove Atlantic, December 1, 2026
“[Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty.” —Wall Street Journal
Far-sighted, darkly amusing, and haunting, Fabrications is a dazzling work of literary imagination told from the perspectives of various powerful artificial intelligences, influenced by Borges and Calvino, and for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro and Emily St. John Mandel
In Fabrications, New York Times-bestselling author and computer scientist Zachary Mason tells stories of an all-too-plausible near-future world molded and mediated by advanced artificial intelligence. Benevolent by design, literal by nature, and immensely powerful when unchained, these are not the chatbots of today’s world, but rather highly evolved yet surprisingly vulnerable beings who permeate nearly all aspects of human life. Their fates inexorably wrapped around those of the people they serve, the AIs communicate in milliseconds but watch the sweep of time unfold from the detached watchtower of immortality.
The revelations Mason conjures from within these beings’ perspectives are brilliantly crafted and strikingly relevant. In “Kami”, AIs are assigned to represent natural phenomena, giving nature legal personhood and setting off a chain of high-stakes consequences. In “Ouroboros”, a hedge fund manager unleashes his AI from the usual constraints, allowing it to make him billions of dollars—when he dies, the program clones him several times over the centuries like a familiar left without a companion. And in “Lamina”, a woman with dementia is gently kept on track and reassured by the medical program implanted in her mind who can be there with her when no one else can.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Karen Russell, and David Mitchell, Zachary Mason holds a mirror up to our contemporary world and dares to imagine what might follow.
Praise for Zachary Mason
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, The New York Times
“Mason’s prose is finely wrought… His imagination soars and his language delights.” —The 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.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Marvelous… The stories’ wonderful variety reflects the cunning, resourceful character of Odysseus himself.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Jubilant in execution. Perverse and irreverent.” —The Boston Globe
“An absolute delight.” —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
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.”
—Electric Literature
“[An] impressive collection of flash fictions that accentuate the pain, frustrations, and regrets of well-known and unfamiliar myths.” —Publishers Weekly
Void Star
“[Mason] writes with a mathematical precision that often crystallizes into lines of clean, poetic beauty.” —The 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.” —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.” —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.” —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 story―of mortality, memory, and what it means to be human―holds all the force and power of mythology.”
—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
About the Author
Zachary Mason is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a variation on Homer; Void Star, a science fiction novel about artificial intelligence; and Metamorphica, based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He lives in California.
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