Central Station

By Lavie Tidhar

Appeals to fans of classic and contemporary science fiction and mainstream fiction

Contains international and multicultural themes

Israeli-born author has also lived in Vanuatu, Laos, South Africa, Israel, and the UK

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781616962159

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar's work encompasses literary fiction (Maror, Adama and the forthcoming Six Lives), cross-genre classics such as Jerwood Prize winner A Man Lies Dreaming (2014) and World Fantasy Award winner Osama (2011) and genre works like the Campbell and Neukom prize winner Central Station (2016). He has also written comics (Adler, 2020) and children's books such as Candy (2018) and the forthcoming A Child's Book of the Future (2024). He is a former columnist for the Washington Post and a current honorary Visiting Professor and Writer in Residence at the American International University in London.

Book preview

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ONE: The Indignity of Rain

he smell of rain caught them unprepared. It was spring, there was that smell of jasmine and it mixed with the hum of electric buses, and there were solar gliders in the sky, like flocks of birds. Ameliah Ko was doing a Kwasa-Kwasa remix of a Susan Wong cover of Do You Wanna Dance. It had begun to rain in silver sheets, almost silently; the rain swallowed the sound of gunshots and it drenched the burning buggy down the street, and the old homeless man taking a shit by the dumpster, with his grey pants around his ankles, got caught in it, his one roll of toilet paper in his hand, and he cursed, but quietly. He was used to the indignity of rain.

The city had been called Tel Aviv. Central Station rose high into the atmosphere in the south of the city, bordered in by the webwork of silenced old highways. The station’s roof rose too high to see, serving the stratospheric vehicles that rose from and landed onto its machine-smooth surface. Elevators like bullets shot up and down the station and, down below, in the fierce Mediterranean sun, around the space port a bustling market heaved with commerce, visitors and residents, and the usual assortment of pickpockets and identity thieves.

From orbit down to Central Station, from Central Station down to street level, and out from within the air-conditioned liminal space into the poverty of the neighbourhood around the port, where Mama Jones and the boy Kranki stood hand in hand, waiting.

The rain caught them by surprise. The space port, this great white whale, like a living mountain rising out of the urban bedrock, drew onto itself the formation of clouds, its very own miniature weather system. Like islands in the ocean, space ports saw localised rains, cloudy skies, and a growth industry of mini-farms growing like lichen on the side of their vast edifices.

The rain was warm and the drops fat and the boy reached out his hand and cupped a raindrop between his fingers.

Mama Jones, who had been born in this land, in this city that had been called many names, to a Nigerian father and a Filipina mother, in this very same neighbourhood, when the roads still thrummed to the sound of the internal combustion engine and the central station had served buses, not suborbitals, and could remember wars, and poverty, and being unwanted here, in this land fought over by Arab and Jew, looked at the boy with fierce protective pride. A thin, glittering membrane, like a soap bubble, appeared between his fingers, the boy secreting power and manipulating atoms to form this thing, this protective snow globe, capturing within it the single drop of rain. It hovered between his fingers, perfect and timeless.

Mama Jones waited, if a little impatiently. She ran a shebeen here, on the old Neve Sha’anan road, a pedestrianised zone from the old days, that ran right up to the side of the space port, and she needed to be back there.

Let it go, she said, a little sadly. The boy turned deep blue eyes on her, a perfect blue that had been patented some decades earlier before finding its way to the gene clinics here, where it had been ripped, hacked and resold to the poor for a fraction of the cost.

They said south Tel Aviv had better clinics even than Chiba or Yunnan, though Mama Jones rather doubted it.

Cheaper, though, perhaps.

Is he coming? the boy said.

I don’t know, Mama Jones said. Maybe. Maybe today he is coming.

The boy turned his head to her, and smiled. He looked very young when he smiled. He released the strange bubble in his hand and it floated upwards, through the rain, the single suspended raindrop inside rising towards the clouds that birthed it.

Mama Jones sighed, and she cast a worried glance at the boy. Kranki was not a name, as such. It was a word from Asteroid Pidgin, itself a product of Earth’s old South Pacific contact languages, carried into space by the miners and engineers sent there as cheap labour by the Malay and Chinese companies. Kranki, from the old English cranky, it meant variously grumpy or crazy or . . .

Or a little odd.

Someone who did things that other people didn’t.

What they called, in Asteroid Pidgin, nakaimas.

Black magic.

She was worried about Kranki.

Is he coming? Is that him?

There was a man coming towards them, a tall man with an aug behind his ear, and skin that showed the sort of tan one got from machines, and the uneasy steps of someone not used to this gravity. The boy pulled on her hand. Is that him?

Maybe, she said, feeling the hopelessness of the situation as she did each time they repeated this little ritual, every Friday before the Shabbat entered, when the last load of disembarking passengers arrived at Tel Aviv from Lunar Port, or Tong Yun on Mars, or from the Belt, or from one of the other Earth cities like Newer Delhi or Amsterdam or São Paulo. Each week, because the boy’s mother had told him, before she died, that his father would one day return, that his father was rich and was working far away, in space, and that one day he would return, return on a Friday so as not to be late for the Shabbat, and he would look after them.

Then she went and overdosed on Crucifixation, ascending to heaven on a blaze of white light, seeing God while they tried to pump her stomach but it was too late, and Mama Jones, somewhat reluctantly, had to look after the boy—because there was no one else.

In North Tel Aviv the Jews lived in their skyrises, and in Jaffa to the South the Arabs had reclaimed their old land by the sea. Here, in between, there were still those people of the land they had called variously Palestine or Israel and whose ancestors had come there as labourers from around the world, from the islands of the Philippines, and from the Sudan, from Nigeria, and from Thailand or China, whose children were born there, and their children’s children, speaking Hebrew and Arabic and Asteroid Pidgin, that near-universal language of space. Mama Jones looked after the boy because there was no one else and the rule across this country was the same in whichever enclave of it you were. We look after our own.

Because there is no one else.

It’s him! The boy pulled at her hand. The man was coming towards them, something familiar about his walk, his face, suddenly confusing Mama Jones. Could the boy really be right? But it was impossible, the boy wasn’t even b—

Kranki, stop! The boy, pulling her by the hand, was running towards the man, who stopped, startled, seeing this boy and this woman bearing down on him. Kranki stopped before the man, breathing heavily. Are you my dad? he said.

Kranki! said Mama Jones.

The man went very still. He squatted down, to be level with the boy, and looked at him with a serious, intent expression.

It’s possible, he said. I know that blue. It was popular for a while, I remember. We hacked an open source version out of the trademarked Armani code. . . . He looked at the boy, then tapped the aug behind his ear—a Martian aug, Mama Jones noticed with alarm.

There had been life on Mars, not the ancient civilizations dreamed of in the past, but a dead, microscopic life. Then someone found a way to reverse engineer the genetic code, and made augmented units out of it. . . .

Alien symbionts no one understood, and few wanted to.

The boy froze, then smiled, and his smile was beatific. He beamed. Stop it! Mama Jones said. She shook the man until he almost lost his balance. Stop it! What are you doing to him?

I’m . . . The man shook his head. He tapped the aug and the boy unfroze, and looked around him, bewildered, as though he was suddenly lost. You had no parents, the man told him. You were labbed, right here, hacked together out of public property genomes and bits of black market nodes. He breathed. Nakaimas, he said, and took a step back.

Stop it! Mama Jones said again, feeling helpless. He is not—

I know. The man had found his calm again. I am sorry. He can speak to my aug. Without an interface. I must have done a better job than I thought, back then.

Something about the face, the voice, and suddenly she felt a tension in her chest, an old feeling, strange and unsettling now. Boris? she said. Boris Chong?

What? he raised his face, looking at her properly for the first time. She could see him so clearly now, the harsh Slavic features and the dark Chinese eyes, the whole assemblage of him, older now, changed by space and circumstances, but still him. . . .

Miriam?

She had been Miriam Jones, then. Miriam after her grandmother. She tried to smile, couldn’t. It’s me, she said.

But you—

I never left, she said. You did.

The boy looked between them. Realisation, followed by disappointment, made his face crumble. Above his head the rain gathered, pulled out of the air, forming into a wavering sheet of water through which the sun broke into tiny rainbows.

I have to go, Miriam said. It’d been a long time since she’d been Miriam to anybody.

Where? Wait— Boris Chong looked, for once, confused.

Why did you come back? Miriam said.

He shrugged. Behind his ear the Martian aug pulsed, a parasitic, living thing feeding off its host. I . . .

I have to go, Mama Jones, Miriam, she had been a Miriam and that part of her, long buried, was awakening inside her, and it made her feel strange, and uncomfortable, and she tugged on the boy’s hand and the shimmering sheet of water above his head burst, falling down on either side of him, forming a perfect, wet circle on the pavement.

Every week she had acquiesced to the boy’s mute desire, had taken him to the space port, to this gleaming monstrosity in the heart of the city, to watch and to wait. The boy knew he had been labbed, knew no woman’s womb had ever held him, that he had been birthed within the cheap labs where the paint peeled off the walls and the artificial wombs often malfunctioned—but there had been a market for disused foetuses too, there was a market for anything.

But like all children, he never believed. In his mind his mother really had gone up to heaven, Crucifixation her key to the gates, and in his mind his father would come back, just the way she’d told him, descend from the heavens of Central Station and come down, to this neighbourhood, stuck uncomfortably between North and South, Jew and Arab, and find him, and offer him love.

She pulled on Kranki’s hand again and he came with her, and the wind like a scarf wound itself around him, and she knew what he was thinking.

Next week, perhaps, he would come.

Miriam, wait!

Boris Chong, who had once been beautiful, when she was beautiful, in the soft nights of spring long ago as they lay on top of the old building filled with domestic workers for the rich of the North, they had made themselves a nest there, between the solar panels and the wind traps, a little haven made of old discarded sofas and an awning of colourful calico from India with political slogans on it in a language neither of them spoke. They had lain there, and gloried in their naked bodies up on the roof, in spring, when the air was warm and scented with the lilacs and the bushes of jasmine down below, late-blooming jasmine, that released its smell at night, under the stars and the lights of the space port.

She kept moving, it was only a short walk to her shebeen, the boy came with her, and this man, a stranger now, who had once been young and beautiful, whispering to her in Hebrew his love, only to leave her, long ago, it was so long ago—

This man was following her, this man she no longer knew, and her heart beat fast inside her, her old, flesh heart, which had never been replaced. Still she marched on, passing fruit and vegetable stalls, the gene clinics, upload centres selling secondhand dreams, shoe shops (for people will always need shoes on their feet), the free clinic, a Sudanese restaurant, the rubbish bins, and finally she arrived at Mama Jones’ Shebeen, a holein-the-wall nestled between an upholsterer’s and a Church of Robot node, for people always need old sofas and armchairs reupholstered, and they always need faith, of whatever sort.

And drink, Miriam Jones thought as she entered the establishment, where the light was suitably dim, the tables made of wood, with cloth over each, and where the nearest node would have broadcast a selection of programming feeds had it not been stuck, some time back, on a South Sudanese channel showing a mixture of holy sermons, weather reports that never changed, and dubbed reruns of the long-running Martian soap Chains of Assembly, and nothing else.

A raised bar, offering Palestinian Taiba beer and Israeli Maccabee on tap, locally made Russian vodka, a selection of soft drinks and bottled lager, sheesha pipes for the customers and backgammon boards for use of same—it was a decent little place, it did not make much but it covered rent and food and looking after the boy, and she was proud of it. It was hers.

There were only a handful of regulars sitting inside, a couple of dockyard workers off-shift from the space port sharing a sheesha and drinking beer, chatting amiably, and a tentacle-junkie flopping in a bucket of water, drinking arak, and Isobel Chow, her friend Irena Chow’s daughter, sitting there with a mint tea, looking deep in thought. Miriam touched her lightly on the shoulder as she came in but the girl did not even stir. She was deep in the virtuality, that is to say, in the Conversation.

Miriam went behind the bar. All around her the endless traffic of the Conversation surged and hummed and called, but she tuned the vast majority of it out of her consciousness.

Kranki, Mama Jones said, I think you should go up to the flat and do your school work.

Finished, the boy said. He turned his attention to the sheesha pipe nearby and cupped blue smoke in his hand, turning it into a smooth round ball. He became intensely absorbed. Mama Jones, now standing behind her counter and feeling a lot more at ease, here, queen of her domain, heard the footsteps and saw the shadow pass and then the tall, thin frame of the man she last knew as Boris Chong came in, bending under the too-low doorframe.

Miriam, can we talk?

What would you have?

She gestured at the shelves behind her. Boris Chong’s pupils dilated, and it made a shiver pass down Mama Jones’ spine. He was communicating, silently, with his Martian aug.

Well? Her tone was sharper than she intended. Boris’s eyes opened wider. He looked startled. An arak, he said, and suddenly smiled, the smile transforming his face, making him younger, making him—

More human, she decided.

She nodded and pulled a bottle from the shelf and poured him a glass of arak, that anise drink so beloved in that land, and added ice, and brought it to him to a table, with chilled water to go beside it—when you poured the water in, the drink changed colour, the clear liquid becoming murky and pale like milk.

Sit with me.

She stood with her arms crossed, then relented. She sat down and he, after a moment’s hesitation, sat down also.

Well? she said.

How have you been? he said.

Well.

You know I had to leave. There was no work here anymore, no future—

I was here.

Yes.

Her eyes softened. She knew what he meant, of course. Nor could she blame him. She had encouraged him to go and, once he was gone, there was nothing to it but for both of them to move on with life, and she, on the whole, did not regret the life she’d led.

You own this place?

It pays the rent, the bills. I look after the boy.

He is . . .

She shrugged. From the labs, she said. It could be he was one of yours, like you said.

There were so many . . . he said. Hacked together of whatever non-proprietary genetic code we could get our hands on. Are they all like him?

Miriam shook her head. I don’t know . . . it’s hard to keep track of all the kids. They don’t stay kids, either. Not forever. She called out to the boy. Kranki, could you bring me a coffee, please?

The boy turned, his serious eyes trained on them both, the ball of smoke still in his hand. He tossed it in the air and it assumed its regular properties and dispersed. Aww . . . he said.

"Now, Kranki, Miriam said. Thank you." The boy went to the bar and Miriam turned back to Boris.

Where have you been all this time? she said.

He shrugged. Spent some time on Ceres, in the Belt, working for one of the Malay companies. He smiled. No more babies. Just . . . fixing people. Then I did three years at Tong Yun, picked up this— He gestured at the pulsating mass of biomatter behind his ear.

Miriam said, curious, Did it hurt?

It grows with you, Boris said. The . . . the seed of the thing is injected, it sits under the skin, then it starts to grow. It . . . can be uncomfortable. Not the physicality of it but when you start to communicate, to lay down a network.

It made Miriam feel strange, seeing it. Can I touch it? she said, surprising herself. Boris looked very self-conscious; he always did, she thought, and a fierce ray of pride, of affection, went through her, startling her.

Sure, he said. Go ahead.

She reached out, touched it, gingerly, with the tip of one finger. It felt like skin, she thought, surprised. Slightly warmer, perhaps. She pressed, it was like touching a boil. She removed her hand.

The boy, Kranki, came with her drink—a long-handled pot with black coffee inside it, brewed with cardamom seeds and cinnamon. She poured, into a small china cup, and held it between her fingers. Kranki said, I can hear it.

Hear what?

It, the boy said, insistent, pointing at the aug.

Well, what does it say? Miriam said, taking a sip of her coffee. She saw Boris was watching the boy intently.

It’s confused, Kranki said.

How so?

It feels something strange from its host. A very strong emotion, or a mix of emotions. Love and lust and regret and hope, all tangled together . . . it’s never experienced that before.

Kranki!

Miriam hid a shocked laugh as Boris reared back, turning red.

That’s quite enough for today, Miriam said. Go play outside.

The boy brightened considerably. Really? Can I?

Don’t get too far. Stay where I can see you.

"I can always see you," the boy said, and ran out without a look back. She could see the faint echo of his passing through the digital sea of the Conversation, then he disappeared into the noise outside.

Miriam sighed. Kids, she said.

It’s all right. Boris smiled, looking younger, reminding her of other days, another time. I thought about you, often, he said.

Boris, why are you here?

He shrugged again.

Reviews for Central Station

[andreas6wpv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Quite enjoyed this: a silent, futuristic, not fantastic science fiction. Language reminiscent of the flowery expressions like Rafik Schami or some Salman Rushdie. Gentle, slow, focusing not on persons really but on being human, perhaps what it means being human.Not a real plot, perhaps, but lives interwoven in a story of stories, flowing rather acting, with sentences sprouting words in all directions weaving lives together.

[glennis.leblanc · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is a set of interlocking short stories that take place in Tel Aviv of the future. There is a space station above it so it is a hub of travel for people coming from the colonies to return home. The stories all are connected to one family that lives there. Most of the stories have been published before but a few are new to this collection. It isn’t all life and death stories some are quiet gems about birth, death, and religion. This isn’t a huge sprawling world you see, it is a close to home slice of the future and is rather fun to read how we will change as a society because of what we did when we fought wars, came up with new technologies and met new species. I did like that even in the far future there were still book collectors. And enjoyable read and makes me want to pick up more of the author’s stuff.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is a smell of the sea, and of the sweat of so many bodies, their heat and their warmth, and it is the smell of humanity’s spices and the cool scent of its many machines."In “Central Station” by Lavie TidharThis is a navel gazing novel; a friend of mine would say it's a novel about the human condition. Back in the day, this was the stuff that interested me less. But they say SF at its best is allegorical and because contemporary versions are all about we live in navel gazing times, this one was much up my alley. Quoting from “Blade Runner”, in one of the most wonderful Roy Batty lines, just so you know how geeky I am: "I've felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it...felt it!", one can sense what makes us human even in a SF milieu. This existential part is what makes the genre so appealing to me. I wonder when they will do a film based on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars stuff? It has to be high-quality to do justice, casting & special effects both, so it’s going cost a bunch, also there are some themes they might not want to show the masses at this stage, perhaps that is some factor why, surprisingly, they haven't tried a film yet... big bucks to be made though if they do it well! How will you cram, what, 1500 pages of well-crafted prose into 90 minutes of Hollywood glitz? We all remember what happened to e.g. "Dune" when they tried that.Even if we ignore ancient stories that could be categorised as SF (e.g. guy goes voyaging for golden fleece, gains it by sweet-talking girl for advice on how to avoid the guardian monster, marries her and has children, ditches her and sacrifices their children to escape, wife becomes justifiably homicidal and wreaks vengeance from a dragon-drawn chariot...) and go straight for the academically agreed "first ever" science fiction story - Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus - it's generally been about the characters. For every 9 books of the Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (did someone think Asimov?) variety there's a “Venus Plus X”. And here we are, decades later, still making the "but then 90% of everything is crap" protestations, and still fighting the critical ignorance that insists that SF is all about rocket ships and ray guns. Of course a lot of it is. For the same reason that you recognise the names Jackie Collins and Dan Brown - because schlock sells. I'm just pointing out myself that "new wave" was a term used to describe the type of SF going way back to the 60s and that nothing really has changed since - there still remain new SF books worth investing the time taken to read and those that make you wish you hadn't. There are still those that examine "the human condition", some that contrast by examining "the non-human condition" and those that ignore both to concentrate on the technical issues. And in each of those groups, the same old 90/10 ratio of crap to gems. The same as every other branch of any other art. SF has long been about the human condition, I dare-say since it was ever a 'thing' and before, men have written about what it is to be a man/woman. I would say most things SF presently use it just to fill plot holes - star trek had its “treknobabble”, but it also explored humanity, something modern SF shows seem to barely acknowledge. Heck, even Terminator 2 plucked a few notes in that regard, besides being a brilliant action film. Yeah, come to think of it plenty of 90s SF films had a bit of the old existentialism going on, “Dark City”, “Contact”, “Matrix” (first one, just about) - I have a terrible memory and can't recall any more off the top of my head because I’m getting senile due to old age… I've watched “Arrival”, and the bulk of the film’s juicy stuff came from the book, i.e., a language expressing thoughts/meaning all-at-once, and the relationship with time being a very interesting theme. We're fast approaching the singularity though; population, productivity, consumption, identity; so who knows how we'll handle the future. Man was not born to be idle, and there's a lot of idleness approaching, and idle hands are the devils workshop. These questions, they're age old, really, aren't they. SF with outer space settings is a fraction of that genre. Much SF takes place in the future here on earth. That’s why Tidhar’s novel came as total surprise in this day and age of contemporary SF. This is my first Tidhar, but I suspect that all of his novels may have existentialist themes to them. I'm not exactly sure what the true premise of this book is, except that it's no longer difficult to imagine some of the fiction in SF and that the struggles of book’s characters now seem oddly familiar to me. Every single story in this book’s tapestry has a subtle human angle: The greatest dangers for Jews and Arabs in this novel are not each other, but “strigoi” humans with vampire-like power; at the Central Station, ethnicity, religion, race, technology, and virtual reality rub elbows; descriptions of fantastical aspects of the future seem like references to completely commonplace occurrences...sublime writing. SF with believable characters with complex emotional lives driving the plot. Wow, if only someone had thought of this before of course; there is a lot SF that has unrealistic characters driven by the needs of the plot, but that describes all fiction. The all-over-the-place plot will not be to anyone’s tastes, even to the SF hardcore fan. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Tidhar refers to so many classics in SF, yet he chose a structure for his work that not many of those writers would have considered. It's a work in constant dialogue with the genre but not afraid to go off the beaten path. As such it is not a book for everyone, but if one likes a book that is a bit weird even by SF standards, “Central Station” might be your thing. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed it.SF = Speculative Fiction.

[iansales_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Once upon a time fix-up novels were pretty common in science fiction. Authors would take a bunch of stories, lash them together with a crude framing narrative, and then the whole thing would be presented as a novel. Some were more successful than others… but the fix-up is still an ugly, lumpy and lop-sided beast of a narrative form. Central Station, although presented as a fix-up novel, and on plenty of novel award shortlists, strikes me more as a collection of linked stories, although there is a story arc which progresses throughout it. I remember one or two of the stories appearing in Interzone and, at the time, I wasn’t especially taken with them. But given the success of this “novel”, and because several people have told me the stories work better together than they did in isolation, I decided to give it a go. And… it still doesn’t really read like a novel. But the individual stories do benefit from being in a collection. Alone, they felt incomplete, unresolved, whereas the novel shows that the resolution is merely cumulative and deferred. The title refers to space port in Tel Aviv/Jaffa, and the stories are focused on a handful of families who live in the environs. There’s no date – it’s the future of a century or two hence – which occasionally leads to weird inconsistences in the setting, a feeling that tropes are deployed when needed rather than being integral, or natural, to the background. The prose, happily, is uniformly good, which means the stories are a pleasure to read. But if each individual story feels slightly unresolved, the novel, as a novel qua novel, manages not to feel that way. I don’t think Central Station is as adventurous, or as challenging, as some commentators have claimed, and it probably says more about the way we now view awards, than it does the book itself, that it’s appeared on so many shortlists – I mean, Osama, A Man Lies Dreaming, those were genuinely challenging sf novels. But, on the other hand, Central Station is a well-crafted piece of science fiction, with visible writing chops in evidence, and such books seem all too rare in the genre these days…

[ardvisoor · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received an Advanced Reader Copy from the publisher through NetGallery, and this is my first read of Tidhar's works.Lavie Tidhar used a mix of past religious figures to create a complicated future.This story is created of hope and lost of hope. Souls that are forgotten and try to be remembered, to be known.A strange politic and history of wars and faith creates new intelligent beings and the purpose of their creation is now forgotten.Human and non human live with and at the same time without each other,they to communicate,know and understand the other and experience feelings you don't think they posses;people who don't seem to live peacefully close to each other all are gathered and put in the story plot and somehow you believe it, accept that it is not that impossible.This books is a difficult but intelligent work.

[altheaann · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It'd been a while since I'd read some really good, original cyberpunk - and Tidhar's vision of a future Israel definitely qualifies. I'm upping my 'star rating' to a four because the setting of 'Central Station,' its conflicts and concerns, are so vivid, rich and enjoyable.

However, this is a fix-up novel, and it shows. I'd read a couple of the segments in this book before, in somewhat different form, and said, "hmm" when I encountered them. At the end, there is a list of all the venues where other segments were previously published - it's most of the book. There's nothing wrong with having what's essentially a collection of short stories with a twisting strand of plot tying them together - but at times some of the different stories felt like puzzle pieces awkwardly shoved into spaces that didn't quite fit.

Even then, though - I still liked the stories. What I mainly took away from 'Central Station' was its sense of history and community, how even as technology changes what it means to be human, and even as social injustice and all the weaknesses of humanity persist through those changes, a city is still a rich tapestry full of life, with all of its inhabitants' wonderful quirks, their loves, their dreams, their connections.

I'll definitely be following this author in the future.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinions are solely my own.

[texascheeseman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Central StationAuthor: Lavie TidharPublisher: Tachyon PublicationsPublished In: San Francisco, CA Date: 2016Pgs: 275REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERSSummary:Tel Aviv, the future. 250,000 people live at the base of a space station. Here virtual reality, humanity and all its cultures, the Others, mind plagues, data vampires, cyborgs, and digital consciousness collide. Central Station stands between humanity and space. One leap. Old world, new world.Genre:AliensAndroidsCyberpunkFictionMechaPhilosophyPulpRobotsScience fictionSpaceVampiresWhy this book:A giant spaceport in the middle of Tel Aviv-Jaffa swirling with the religious, cultural differences magnified a billion times by the entire solar system passing through there.______________________________________________________________________________Favorite Character:Mama Miriam Jones who took the orphaned boy in. Miriam who takes Carmel, the data vampire, in. Miriam who, a long time ago, was a young woman, who loved Boris before he left Earth to put distance between himself and all that is Earth.Miriam’s brother, Achimwene Haile Selaissie Jones, bookseller and friend to Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man. Character I Most Identified With:Lots of characters here. Each of them fronts their own layer to this world’s onion.I feel Achimwene in my love of books. His descriptions and the descriptions of his shop ring a bell in my head and heart.The Feel:There’s a Pinocchio story in here. They are all chasing being human in their individual ways. And finding that humanity in odd ways unique to each individual.Echoes of Beauty and the Beast show in a subplot here with Motl and Isobel.And more echoes of Romeo and Juliet in many of the relationships in the book.Favorite Scene / Quote:Great world building. Lots of texture and backhanded info dump without being overwhelming. Info dump coming through character action and individual scene setting. Well done.The description of what Carmel did to Stolichnaya Biru, though whether he intended all along to make his suicide part of his Stillness within a Storm art installation at Polyphemus Port on Titan or if he was pushed further around the bend by Carmel draining his soul, life, data a bit at a time.Love Motl’s flashback to one of the wars that he was caught up in as a robotnik. Dune’s sandworms in the Sinai. A bioweapon that got loose and started breeding beneath the sands. The Bedouins hunting them for the medicinal qualities of their venom is a nice touch.Achimwene’s reverence when Ibrahim brings him a box from a time capsule, a box full of ancient books.The deep Nirvana of the in-book gaming world, the MMORPG on quantum steroids, and the possibility of diving deep into the game architecture dredging through its past and coming to...I’m not going to ruin it, but it made me laugh hard.Pacing:No real action through the majority of this book. But the world is so immersive that you can read a chapter that is a noded man sitting with a cyborged robotnik having coffee and talking about old times and the future and it feels like a lot has happened. Tidhar has created a tremendously immersive experience in this book.Hmm Moments:Elronites? LOL. Stood in context against the various religions and beliefs from the real world and the ones that are unique to the setting which are all part and parcel of this Tel Aviv-Jaffa-Central Station megacity and the Asimovian and Heinleinian aspects, that’s awesome.How many cloned messiah came out of the vats? How many different factions are trying to gin up their own unifier?A genetically certified descendant of King David rode into Jerusalem on a white donkey, amidst portents of an ending, not necessarily The End. Then, someone took him out with a sniper rifle. And, since then the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Jaffa-Central Station corridor had been awash with almost messiahs; genejobs, Others beyond the human condition, some points between human and virtual. But messiah projects were everywhere; the Singularity Jesus Project in Laos, the Black Monks of Mars, or the massive virtuality birthing and rebirthing the victims of The Holocaust taking place on the Zion asteroid as it makes its way out system following a beamed dream of what they believed to be a dreaming alien god, 6,000,000 virtual Jewish ghosts taken on an ultimate diaspora.The Stirgoi / Shambleau data vampires are wicked creatures. Tearing away all that their victims are either all at once or a bite at a time as they slip toward mindlessness / emptiness. The second is what Carmel did to Stolly. The first is what the data vampire on the freighter Emaciated Savior did to Carmel before injecting soul, life, data back into her and making her a Stirgoi in her own right.Worldbuilding where a cyborg beggar ex-soldier, more machine than man, uses the exclamation “Jesus Elron!” when introduced to a data vampire.The Burning God was interesting, existing in all the layers of Man, machine, the Conversation, the virtual, the gameverse, and the deep other. Made me think of Burning Man, maybe Burning Man on acid.WTF Moments:The Others bodysurfing the humans sounds horrible from the human perspective. The humans being involved out-of-body or asleep and awakening to find something different about their body when they awake.______________________________________________________________________________Last Page Sound:That was cool.Author Assessment:Will definitely look at other stuff by Lavie Tidhar.Knee Jerk Reaction:instant classicDisposition of Book:Irving Public LibrarySouth CampusIrving, TXDewey Decimal System: FTIDWould recommend to:everyone______________________________________________________________________________

[bhutton_10 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A fascinating set of interlinked short stories. So much depth giving hints of the wider solar system wide society while remaining anchored to the central station, the unspoken heart of the stories. There is such a sense of space never directly explained but sketched out by the stories that are told and how they interact with the Station. Beautiful prose and makes the most of its narrative limits. Not all the stories hit but the imagery and world building make up for any failings in the plots.

[robertday_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There have been science fiction novels before that have tried to illustrate everyday life in the future. It's actually hard to pull that trick off, because all too often the writer attempts to shoe-horn all sorts of ideas into the book that just don't ring true, especially a few years down the line when it turns out that the future isn't as different as we expected. We see this now.If I'd read a novel when I was 14 about everyday life in the early 21st Century, I'd be excited by the computers, the Web, the mobile phones and the high-definition televisions connecting me to the world. But I'd be unimpressed by the absence of flying cars, silver suits and personal jetpacks. And I'd perhaps be surprised to find in that novel that many of us still live in the same houses, we catch buses or trains to work, we still read books (at least some of us), use utensils in our everyday lives that have been unchanged for centuries, and have things around us that are very old as well as brand new. (I have crockery and drinking glasses in particular that I know are a good sixty years old.) This isn't how we were told the future would be (and a good thing too, many would say).Lavie Tidhar's 'Central Station' is a book that depicts a future as lived by ordinary people. They do things and have lives that are radically changed from our own; but at the same time, they live in spaces, and use things, that we would recognise; indeed, I'm sure that if you dived down to some of the scenes in the book, you would find things - the glasses in Miriam Jones' shebeen, the books in Achimwene's collection - that are with us now. And that is the great thing about this personal narrative, told in fourteen short stories, interlinked by characters and (in particular) the place. There is a tremendous sense of continuity, of how lives might be lived two hundred or so years from now.There are differences, of course. Humanity has colonised space and travel to other worlds is comparatively commonplace. The virtual world has grown, and has become more seamlessly integrated with the biological. And human biology has been amended to adopt and adapt to these changes, sometimes in ways that seem to rob people of their humanity (except it doesn't, despite everything).For some readers, the setting will seem the most fantastical part of the story - a spaceport built above the post-Israeli city of Tel Aviv. How we got there from here is not part of the story; there have been wars and peaces, and we get glimpses of the ruins of the Israel/Palestine we see today. But there is no sense that there has been any major dislocation of peoples; the region remains the melting pot it always was, and the building of Central Station in particular, an event just fading in human memory at the time of the book, acted as a magnet to draw people in from a range of different cultures. All have contributed to a diverse, vibrant city, though one not without its problems.This is not a book of action and adventure. Some of the characters have lived lives that would be incredible to us - think Roy Batty's closing speech in Blade Runner, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...", though in Central Station, the characters would believe these things whilst recognising their wondrousness - but it is a book that rings true. The author was born in Israel and has lived all over the world. It shows in the lives he brings to our attentions; perhaps for a white, middle-aged British reader, this is as much a part of the fantastical picture as anything else. As someone once said, Earth is the alien planet.

[bravenewbks · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars.The world-building is impressive. Everything from the micro (patented eye colors) to the macro (new world religions) to the fantastic (vampires!) has been carefully remained and integrated. Unfortunately, this felt like a series of short stories set in the same world rather than a coherent novel. Though there's some overlap, it seemed that most chapters had their own primary characters; I would have preferred to see the author take one or two or three of these characters and develop an overarching story. In some ways, this is The Silmarilion of this world, where I was hoping for The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

[nancyadair-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Central Station imagines a world where divisions have blurred between man-created and biological entities and corporate and personal memory. Conversation has shifted from personal one-on-one dialogue to universal eavesdropping and vicarious experience available through an implanted node.Central Station is the interstellar port that rises above Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa where people "still lived as they had always lived." We will recognize aspects of their lives, the human need for love, the seeking of answers through faith and escape through drugs, the vilification of those who are different. And yet this world, this society, is totally a new imagining.Originally a series of short stories about individuals whose ancestors came to build the station or fight in the old wars, this is not a plot-driven book but is still compulsive. Long explanations do not burden the tale; you take the strange and new by faith and context, growing into understanding.Some of the characters and their stories include:Boris Chong and Miriam Jones had once been young and in love. Boris worked in the labs that created human life but left to work on Mars. He has returned to Central Station with a Martian aug, a parasite, having learned his father's memory was failing. Miriam has adopted a strange child born in Boris's lab.Boris is followed by an ex-lover named Carmel, a data vampire who is shunned and dangerous. Carmel becomes lovers with one of the few humans without a node, Achimwene, a man she cannot feed on and who cannot become addicted to the dopamine high stimulated by her theft of their memory data. Sometimes he wonders what it was like to be "whole," growing up part of the Conversation, for a human without a node was a 'cripple'. His passion is for mid-twentieth century pulp fiction books, the cheap paperbacks crumbling and yellowed. Their story and search for answers was one of my favorite sections."Just another broken-down robotnik, just another beggar hunting the night streets looking for a handout or a fix or both."Miriam's sister Isobel Chow is in love with Motl, an ex-soldier who was mechanically rebuilt over and over until he is more machine than man. Robots haven't been made for a long time and these veterans end up on the street begging for replacement parts to keep going. He no longer recalls what wars he had fought, but the vision of war and death remain. He is an ex-addict of the faith drug Crucifixion. Now his parts are breaking down, but his feelings are strong. "Sometimes you needed to believe you could believe, sometimes you had to figure heaven could come from another human being and not just in a pill.""This part of the world had always needed a messiah."R. Brother Patch-It is a robo-priest and part-time moyel. "We dream a consensus of reality," he preaches. It feels tired, old, his parts wearing out, and sometimes he is envious of the human trait of sensation and stimulation. "To be a robot, you needed faith, R. Patch-It thought. To be a human, too." On the flip side, Ruth Cohen longs to be part of something bigger, a total immersion in The Conversation, the linked awareness made possible through the node implant. "Are you willing to give up your humanity?" she is asked.Behind these otherworldly characters are still basic stories of humanity's essence: the search for love and meaning."It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes the master. The circle is complete. And so on.""There comes a time in a man's life when he realizes stories are lies. Things do not end neatly."My son, blog writer of Battered, Tattered, Yellowed and Creased, raved about Tidhar's book (read his review here) which motivated me to request it through NetGalley. Central Station has won multiple awards and huge recognition. It is sure to be a classic. I thank the publisher for the ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.