Look up the term “zero sum game” in any dictionary of contemporary English, and you’ll find an ominous unanimity in their definitions. You’ll also find a confusing complexity of examples, analogies and exceptions.

Basically (very basically, since I’m a math idiot), a “zero sum game” is any situation that can be represented mathematically by an equation in which each side’s losses or gains exactly cancel one another out. Of course, this can cover myriad real-life examples, not only in game theory, but also in economics, politics, war, and any other kind of quantifiable human or cosmic interactions.

In ZERO SUM GAME, her debut volume in a projected series of near-future speculative fiction thrillers, real-life mathematics wizard, stuntwoman and lethal weapons expert S. L. Huang exploits every aspect of the zero sum concept, but mostly the ominous part.

Cas Russell, a rogue math genius and undercover retriever of kidnapped people and their secrets; Rio, her strategically gifted and maddeningly enigmatic not-friend; Arthur Tressler, a clever but often blindsided everyday private investigator; and Checker, an uber-geek who can hack any computer system anywhere, are unwillingly caught up in a vortex of mental and physical combat against ice-woman telepath Dawna Polk of the vast mind-bending syndicate Pithica, whose tentacles are spreading far and wide to achieve global domination. That’s it in a big nutshell.

"As ZERO SUM GAME unfolds in a maze of unbalancing twists and turns, the reader, along with Huang’s increasingly frustrated characters, begins to question the basic principles of good, bad, right, wrong, moral, amoral and so on."

If Huang had followed the traditional recipe of pitting her motley crew of marginalized geniuses against Pithica’s seemingly inexhaustible resources and cleverly winning back the planet for humanity, she probably would have produced a satisfying movie-caliber tale that makes us all temporarily feel good about our messed-up world.

But, true to the literal meaning of its title, ZERO SUM GAME does no such thing.

For most of this fast-paced, gripping and sometimes gruesomely violent story, Cas and her colleagues believe themselves to be caught up in a situation we would casually describe as “between a rock and a hard place,” a stalemate, a tie-score, or any of the easy labels that come to mind when two apparently immovable (or equal) forces are locked in combat.

So, like your regular superheroes in any genre, they repeatedly focus on finding and executing even the tiniest and unlikeliest advantages in order to “win” the survival game against an impersonal and ruthless “enemy.”

But what happens in a scenario where there can be no winners or losers, where every gain comes with an equal amount of loss for each side?

Traditional games are won by those who gain more than they lose, leaving the other side with more loss than advantage, and thereby shifting the balance of power. Humans love this kind of game because the outcome (despite its instability in the long term) vindicates one faction’s apparent moral and material superiority over the other.

As ZERO SUM GAME unfolds in a maze of unbalancing twists and turns, the reader, along with Huang’s increasingly frustrated characters, begins to question the basic principles of good, bad, right, wrong, moral, amoral and so on.

The entire ethical structure that most of us rely on to identify and align ourselves with the “good guys” and an expected victorious ending is deftly slipped out from underneath us. Like Cas, Rio, Tressler and Checker, we are blindsided by the concept of zero sum, in which the only solution is that nobody “wins.”

But it doesn’t end there. As Huang brilliantly conveys in the unsettling open-endedness of ZERO SUM GAME, this kind of no-win outcome is not a return to the status quo for either side.

Unlike the temporary stability of traditional power-balancing games, a zero sum game can result in permanent change outside the familiar box of winning and losing. It seems that this is the new niche S. L. Huang is destined to fill.