Central Station

I’m a sucker for linked story collections. Sure, at their worst they can feel like a lazy person’s cheap novel—a thrown together bunch of old stories with a few perfunctory transitions/connections. But at their best they mix the concentrated focus and power of a short story with the weight and depth of a longer narrative arc, making for a wonderfully discursive, elliptical, and yet strong-hitting creation. And that’s exactly what we have in Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station, a beautifully constructed and composed linked-story novel/collection.I come first to Central Station on a day in winter. African refugees sat on the green, expressionless. They were waiting, but for what, I didn’t know. Outside a butchery, two Filipino children played at being airplanes: arms spread wide they zoomed and circled, firing from imaginary underwing machine guns. Behind the butcher’s counter, a Filipino man was hitting a ribcage with his cleaver, separating meat and bones into individual chops. A little farther from it stood the Rosh Ha’ir shawarma stand, twice blown up by suicide bombers in the past but open for business as usual. The smell of lamb fat and cumin wafted across the noisy street and made me hungry.Here in the opening paragraph you can already see some of Central Station’s strengths, beginning with the vivid, precise details. The imaginary airplanes aren’t just “shooting bullets” but firing from “underwing machine guns.” The butcher isn’t just hitting a clump of meat, but a “ribcage.” The food stand isn’t just a stand but a shawarma stand, and it doesn’t smell simply of “exotic spices” but “lamb fat and cumin.” This level of care to detail runs throughout the book making this world come wholly alive.Another aspect shown in the opening paragraph is the rich soup that is the world of Central Station, which as the book goes on will turn out to be populated by the aforementioned Africans, Filipinos, shawarma lovers, orthodox Jews, cyborgs, robotniks, visitors from Mars, data vampires, genetic engineers, disembodied artificial intelligences (“Others”), mysterious lab-created children, and more. And these are just the characters. Throw in the science fiction trappings that seem to appear a dozen to a page (only a slight exaggeration) and you have a wonderful panoply of creativity on display—exodus ships, AIs, immersion pods, bioweapons, robot soldiers, wearables, solar buses, and behind it all, the Conversation:everything was noded. Humans, yes, but also plants robots, appliances, walls, solar panels, nearly everything was connected . . . across that region called the Middle East, across Earth, across trans-solar space and beyond . . . a human was surrounded, every living moment, by the constant hum of other humans, other minds, an endless conversation”The idea of the Conversation, of connection, is nicely mirrored by Central Station’s structure of linked stories and by the way in which Tidhar weaves the connecting threads amongst them via characters, words, and images. In a nice bit of layering, he as well works in genre allusions, such as a reference to the “nine billion names of God” or “Elronism.” The metafictional aspects appear as well in direct references to lives as stories, as when one character realizes that “life wasn’t like that neat classification system . . . Life was half-completed plots abandoned, heroes dying halfway along their quests . . . “ And later, the narrator tells us, “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.”The imaginative richness, sharpness of detail, and complexity of connections would make this a good book, but it’s the depth of characterization and amount of feeling in their stories that makes it an excellent one. Stories of love and loss and regret and relationships and fathers and sons and mothers and sons and old friends and new friends and once-old-friends-not-new-again. Central Station is a lyrically told, expertly constructed, tale that moves even as it impresses in its craftsmanship. Highly recom(originally appeared on fantasyliterature.com)

Central Station is a quiet book about lives on Earth roughly 200 years in the future, in and around Tel Aviv and its spaceport. It's a future in which almost everyone is constantly communicating with everyone else via nodes implanted at birth, children are genetically engineered, alien augmentations can be bonded to human bodies, a software virus can turn people into data vampires, android robots have formed a religion, aging Robotniks created from dead soldiers struggle to assert their humanity, and the mysterious Others are feared, revered, and increasingly powerful. Yet also, human families and communities are fascinating---and often contradictory---blends of ethnic, racial, and religious groups that the reader comes to know through the interconnected characters. Their stories are intriguing and, like real life, rarely find resolution in climactic moments but rather advance, entangle, turn about, and advance again in slightly new directions.Unfortunately, perhaps because most of the chapters were originally written as short stories, following the lives of the many characters through the book was quite a challenge. I often found myself wondering, "Whatever became of so-and-so?" and was disappointed to find no more than a passing mention, particularly when the character had been the focus of an entire chapter. I also became distracted by trying to figure out exactly how far in the future this world was supposed to take place, and only discovered a direct mention of 200 years in one of the later chapters. For all the differences between this future and our present, I found too much that had not changed---from the names of corporations to modes of ground transportation to clothing styles---as compared to the differences between now and 200 years ago, and I had difficulty believing that so much time had passed. This seems a minor point, but it did detract from my ability to immerse myself in the book's world.In short, if you're looking for space opera or a fast-paced SF adventure story, look elsewhere. If you want to consider what everyday life might be like on this planet as technology and social globalization advance, this book is worth a read.

I like this book but none of the reviewers I see here seemed to have the same reaction I had to the book.First off, it is very well written. There are various story threads, following various characters, as they end up in the same place - a future Tel Aviv. It mixes recognizable details with future details - firmly letting you know this is the future but it is a future you can envision. It was a bit confusing at first but it settled down and became clearer after a bit. The future it describes is interesting and believable.However, the book felt very much like it was setting up this world. If I found out this was going to be the first in a series, it would totally make sense. Everything built to an ending and we did get a kind of ending. We see why these people moved together to be there and we see that many of them were manipulated in a way to get there to do what needed to get done to have that scene.But the end didn't provide closure. I understand now where they were headed and for what. But it isn't "Ok, that is resolved." It doesn't feel that way at all. At the end I felt "ok... so what does that mean? What is going to happen now?"I am giving it the 4 stars I want to give if we are going to get another book with some more information. But take it with a grain of salt. If this is the end all and be all... it feels unfinished.Based on the other reviews, maybe it is only me. But I need some closure. Or some direction as to where these people are going from here.

It might be glib to say that Tidhar's novels are told entirely through worldbuilding, but it feels that way often, in the best possible sense. All the characters' various stories do the world building seemlessly. Central station is a very believable. Future because of this. Enjoyable and lovely. Would read more set in this world, in a heart eat.

Beautiful prose, intriguing characters an open hearted exploration of humanity in all its potentials. Love, birth, life and death are eternal but who knows what forms the beings who experience these might take.

I just could not get into this book - the plot and characters were flat and uninteresting to me. Gave up after 60 pages.I feel like there's something good in there for the right person so it gets two stars instead of one, but this just isn't the book for me.

This extraordinary, big-hearted novel looks at life in and around the titular space port in Tel Aviv from a range of perspectives. Past, present and future blend in the sensuously-rendered ‘real’ world and the virtual environs of a post-Internet system called the Conversation.The book references many other science fiction writers, from the phrasing and mosaic structure of works by Cordwainer Smith and Clifford D Simak to the depiction of easy access to extraordinary technology and the resulting borderless, inter-racial societies explored by the cyberpunks. However, ‘Central Station’ is not some noirish futuristic thriller; it deals with a society built over old wounds and conflicts that are not resolved so much as rendered unimportant by the sheer passage of ordinary years. It is as if Lavie Tidhar has made something wholly new out of fragments of other science fiction, in the same way as the denizens of his novel have made an unexpectedly cohesive society out of bits and pieces of old inventions and religions.Two ideas underlie the narrative: one is the famous John Lennon quotation about life being what happens when you’re planning your main event; the other is about the inexorability of change. Indeed, the book combines these two themes so effortlessly it is easy to overlook how sublime the storytelling is.Being science fiction of course, what is ordinary to the characters is extraordinary to us: a maker of gods who could be some kind of artist or, literally, a maker of gods; a haunted data-vampire girl and her lover, who is deemed an invalid because he cannot access the Conversation; a woman who runs a little bar whose adopted son may be a vat-produced messiah and the woman’s erstwhile lover, who may have been the boy’s creator.It is not so much the originality of these ideas that is striking so much as the characters’ practical, stoic and humane responses to them. The boy might be a messiah, but he is still a boy. The data vampire may be part of a larger mystery, but she is still a vulnerable young woman; the god artist may be uncanny, but he appreciates the friendship of an old builder dissolving in memories he cannot control and a rag and bone man who is probably immortal.Very few novels convey the feeling of dense and busy time, compacted over centuries, quite as well as this one. There are stories within stories and a medley of languages from Hebrew to the pidgin English of immigrants who came to Tel Aviv as workers and stayed for generations. The result is that rare thing: an actual science fictional language, as multifaceted conceptually as it is phonetically.This achievement would be considerable on its own. That it is filtered through obstinate, loving, confused human beings and their post-human counterparts (the lovely old robot priest R. Brother Patch-It, who is also a part-time moyen; the old ‘robotnik’ cyborg soldiers who can’t get parts anymore; the eerily mischievous digital Others) in a way that is not only recognisable but compelling makes ‘Central Station’ one of my favourite books of the year.

Almost Bradbury-esque in its poetry and narrative flow, but with added data vampires and robot priests, 'Central Station' is a unique SF novel by a unique voice. Fabulous stuff!