ZERO WORLD by Jason M. Hough

Peter Caswell is an operator/special agent/assassin with little memory of his past life, except that when he wakes he has a target and mission. His surroundings are bare, except for the refrigerator containing Sapporo beer, which he uses to count off the people he remembers killing just before he returns to the waking world. His contact/supervisor often givens him some time to relax and decompress after each mission, but not this time. He is told his target is a newly found space vessel thought missing for over a decade. Soon after Caswell arrives at his goal, he discovers Earth is not alone.

Zero World is Jason Hough’s first hardcover novel after a successful career-launch with The Dire Earth Trilogy. Part of why that trilogy was so successful is because Del Rey had the faith to release the trilogy over the course of three months. It also didn’t hurt that Hough spins a fun yarn. Here in Zero World, Jason sets a much larger canvas for his story, expanding not just beyond the bounds of planet Earth, but beyond the universe itself. Zero World is a high concept SF novel that takes the multiverse/parallel world theory to an ambitious, exaggerated degree and places at its center Peter Caswell, an operative of a highly secretive organization tasked with finding a woman named Alice who was thought to be dead when the vessel on which she was a crew member crashed a little over a decade prior to the events in the novel.

When Caswell’s vessel enters a portal and he finds himself looking down on a world that looks like a cracked mirror image of Earth, he knows he’s got a helluva task in front of him. Fortunately, for many of his missions, one of Caswell’s greatest strength is his ability to blend into unknown environments and fade into the background. It also doesn’t hurt that Caswell is cybernetically enhanced in many ways, with an implant in his head that gives him strength and agility, but also has erected a firewall to his memories. Even with those advantages, how easily can he blend into a world where some of the linguistic terms, cultural mores, and physical attributes mark him as such an outsider? When he arrives at his target, that question (among others in Caswell’s head) are answered.

Hough’s plotting is terrific in this novel, the pace and action pieces in Zero World make for a page turning thrill-ride set against an epic backdrop. We are immediately thrust into Peter’s plight as his mission is thrust upon him. His limited knowledge base allows for the reader to be more attuned to Peter’s disorientation and how he absorbs his surroundings. When he arrives at the parallel world, his limited understanding of who he is comes into greater question when he realizes his target – the woman thought dead for over a decade – has set herself up on this parallel world as a scientific genius and global figure. That is of course a relatively easy task since the parallel world is a few decades behind Earth from a technological standpoint.

Caswell has a small supporting cast: Monique, the woman who gives him his orders, whom he never recalls meeting and Melni, the woman he meets on this parallel world in his search for Alice. As it turns out Melni is also a spy and has her own mission involving Alice. With Alice as a shared target, Melni and Peter form a partnership and soon discover there is much more to Alice and Alice’s goals than either Melni or Peter could have imagined.

If it hasn’t been made clear by this point of the review, I thought Zero World was a blast. One of my favorite Science Fictional tropes* is the Parallel Universe. Stories that feature protagonists/worlds and their mirror images which differ in only slight details, novels like The Talisman, the classic novel from Stephen King/Peter Straub, Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle, or the many parallel worlds in comics, especially those of DC Comics’ Elseworlds. So you’ve got that element with Zero World and a protagonist that is like Leonard Shelby (from the film Memento) possessing the physical abilities of The Bionic Man and the tactical/combat/superspy knowledge of Jason Bourne or James Bond.

* Though a trope in Science Fiction, theoretical physics has very seriously discussed the Parallel World / Multiverse theory

I enjoyed Hough’s first Dire Earth novel The Darwin Elevator, but I never finished out the trilogy. Speaking again of The Dire Earth … Zero World contains a prequel novella to that sequence entitled The Dire Earth, which was originally available only in electronic form. My enjoyment of Zero World coupled with the bonus Dire Earth novella in the book has me eager to pick up the final two books of The Dire Earth. At this point, there does not seem to be a connection between Zero World and The Dire Earth, but considering Zero World is at its core a parallel world milieu, until the author states otherwise, it shouldn’t be completely ruled out. I also hope there are more novels that take place in the milieu featured here in Zero World or Caswell and the cast of characters introduced here. Zero World is a high-concept SF thrill-ride that just about lives up to the author’s lofty ambitions.