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Start giftingZero Sum Game
Cas Russell: Book #1
Narrator
Lauren Fortgang
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Length
11 hours 42 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“A fun, fast-paced action thriller featuring a snarky math superhero who has some serious character flaws. Cas Russell is good at math, so good that she intuitively performs vector calculus at lightning speed, allowing her to dodge both incoming fists and bullets. She’s a mercenary “retrieval expert” with ambiguous morals, available for hire in Los Angeles, and her latest job is proving to be much more challenging and dangerous than she anticipated.”
— Trey • Bookshop Santa Cruz
A blockbuster, near-future science fiction thriller, S.L. Huang's Zero Sum Game introduces a math-genius mercenary who finds herself being manipulated by someone possessing unimaginable power…
Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she'll take any job for the right price.
As far as Cas knows, she’s the only person around with a superpower...until she discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people’s minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world’s puppet master.
Cas should run, like she usually does, but for once she's involved. There’s only one problem...
She doesn’t know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.
S. L. Huang is a Hollywood stunt performer, firearms expert, and Hugo Award-winning writer with a math degree from MIT and credits in productions like "Battlestar Galactica" and "Top Shot." The author of the Cas Russell novels (Tor Books), including Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point, as well as the fantasy novella Burning Roses (Tordotcom Publishing), Huang's short fiction has also appeared in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nature, Tor.com, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies.
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Reviews
"Cas Russell is who I want to be when I grow up. She kicks ass with her fists and her brain—a true twenty-first century action hero. I loved this book."—Richard Kadrey
“This book lines up like a perfect, elegant equation — it’s fast, furious, and adds up to one of the coolest, most crackin’ reads this year. ”—Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Invasive and Star Wars: Aftermath
“The smartest and thrillingest book you’ll read all year.”—Ken Liu, author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
"Paced at a flat out sprint, Zero Sum Game deploys an astonishing array of weapons together with the prickly charms of its math genius protagonist on her turbulent journey toward trust and connection."—Kate Elliott