Zero Sum Game – SL Huang

“I’m just really good at math” is Cas Russell’s excuse for having superpowers. She’s the heroine of Zero Sum Game, SL Huang‘s debut novel. If you think about it, “being good at math” makes a lot more sense than Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider. Even if you slept through freshman biology, you probably picked up that radioactive spiders don’t give you super-powers. And how, exactly, did James Bond get his superpowers? (I’m referring of course to the Daniel Craig version of James Bond, the Bond who could calculate all the angles and fly through the air chasing after Mollaka in the opening sequence of Casino Royale. He was good at math, too!)

After the action sequences in Zero Sum Game,  James Bond seems rather lame in comparison. Don’t worry, there’s about s much math in Zero Sum Game as there are radiactive spiders in Spiderman. Huang has created a compelling superhero who is believably ordinary. Cas is a bit on the spectrum, but somehow seems like a real person even while racking up a body count that would put Bond to shame. Cas has a weakness for kids, a disdain for “cheap polymer piece-of-crap Glocks” and she doesn’t cope well with not having a case to work on.

By the end of Zero Sum Game we understand that there are several novels full of revelation ahead. It’s going to be so great.

I really enjoyed Zero Sum Game. It conveys the same paranoia about reality that we saw in Biodigital, but in a 2014 way. The writing is mature, brilliant and restrained in a way that’s very uncommon in self-published books. I would love to see it turn into a franchise. Movies, books, spin-offs, fan fiction. A giga-franchise would be even better.

Huang totally gets the possibilities of Creative Commons licensing.

I’ve licensed under Creative Commons because I don’t believe in maintaining the right to sue people who love my work enough to share it or make fan works of it. I still hope to make a living off my books . . . and I firmly believe I still can. That licensing this way will get me more readers, and that more readers will mean more revenue.
Prove me right by donating! Or, if you’re not sure you’ll like it, read it first—and if you feel you were entertained, come back and make a contribution of whatever you think the ride was worth.

I’m so thankful for the genius of the writers who are using CC licensing for their books.  What they’re doing is amazing, and we need to do our best to support them.