Tags
2010s, 2016, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, fixup novel, Israeli, John W. Campbell Award winner, Lavie Tidhar, Locus Award nominee, post-cyberpunk, Sarah Anne Langton, science fiction, Tachyon Publications, transhumanism
The towering spaceport of Central Station rises over the old city of Tel Aviv, a melting-pot of Arab, Jew, and the multicultural thousands who flocked there in the wake of a worldwide diaspora. The city’s sprawl is unchecked, packed with hundreds of thousands of people both real and digital, all blended together in one Conversation—the digital network and stream-of-consciousness that cascades all noded life-forms into one stream of endless data. It is the transhuman future, a complex hybrid of beauty and decay… a world as brilliant in its originality as it is startling in its familiarity.
Tidhar’s novel—a fixup constructed from a dozen or so short stories—follows the footsteps of a few people living under Central Station’s shadow. The aging Boris Chong has returned home from Mars, one of many who left Earth to explore the mysteries of the outer belt. Much has changed in his absence. His old flame is now raising a strange yet familiar child who can tap into the Conversation with a mere touch… and whose similarly familiar friend exists only within the Conversation itself. His cousin is in love with a robotnik—a decaying cyborg soldier, reanimated to fight in some long-forgotten war, begging for spare parts or acquiring them by dealing religious narcotics. Boris’ father is terminally ill with another of the war’s side effects, a multigenerational mind-virus, while his mother is rising in rank within the Church of Robot. Hot on his trail is a feared Shambleau, a data vampire, who takes up with Boris’ ex-lover’s brother, an antiquarian whose lack of a node leaves him isolated from the Conversation. Central Station follows the ways these characters are connected—by geography, history, family, and love—a great web of intersecting lives, connected by technology yet transcending both the physical and digital realms.
The novel has been compared to Gibson’s Neuromancer, and while they are very different animals, I made the same comparison myself while reading it. Gibson’s work set the tone for modern SF back in the ’80s, a gritty neo-noir future made up of dot-matrix imagery and droning modem dial tones. It’s little like Central Station’s Tel Aviv other than they are both detailed and defining; the post-cyberpunk spaceport of Central Station is still filled with grit and grime, rusty in spots and spattered with oil-droplets left by passing robotniks, underscored by the scents of jasmine and rose wafting through the lush orange groves. Tidhar’s prose presents the ethereal beauty of a landscape blending the ramshackle, the exotic, and the alluring, blending sickly-sweet fresh love with the sad pangs of heartbreak. Tidhar has quite a way with words, and paints the poetic imagery of future Earth with precision; the plot is a delicate and ephemeral thing, but his writing has a captivating power that I found hard to put down.
Central Station is very much in the vein of literary science fiction, rooted in human-driven drama and eschewing genre’s typical love affair with plot—it’s nearly plotless, to be honest. But is as much a “literary” novel as it is a homage to pulp fiction—see the cover—a love-letter to SF which has come before. There’s a multitude of easter-eggs references scattered throughout these pages: a nod to God’s nine billion names; things will use the verb “ubicked;” the term for “data vampire” is a homage to C.L. Moore’s pulp story “Shambleau,” chosen with obvious care. Mainstream readers will miss many of these gems but they should appeal to the SF faithful, acknowledgement of what has come before and establishing a reference point for Central Station. Both literary SF and pulp homage are acquired tastes, and I fear the book’s literary side in particular will chafe some readers: the writing is rich with beauty and powerful ideas, yet it thrives on the same open-ended ambiguity of modern literary novels, offering little sense of focus or finality by following a non-traditional (and less commercial) story structure. It provides few answers to its many questions.
That, of course, is probably intentional; in life and in the book, love and loss are merely one step in a longer journey, which does not end like a door slamming shut once the driving plot is concluded. Central Station offers some interesting insight on humanity and its various post-human offshoots, less a novel and more a mosaic built like a richly woven tapestry incorporating dozens of lives—plot-threads, story lines, all cut from one small district of one city—just a snapshot of a larger whole. It has a galactic scope as humans push their technology forth among the stars; its long and detailed history was impacted by wars fought so long ago that even its living still-living robotnik veterans cannot remember why or who they fought; it’s still recognizably our Earth, though altered by the spread of dozens of new technology inherited by generations of globalized multiculturalism. And yet it’s a very intimate novel, focusing on the lives and problems of a handful of people… and is quite effective at doing so.
Central Station is a subtle but well-written novel, handling emotionally rich and complex themes with dazzling clarity. The lack of closure for some of its plot-lines may be a bit unsatisfying for mainstream readers, but the novel is never boring—quite the opposite, it’s intoxicating, a dreamlike masterpiece (or near enough to a masterpiece for me). It’s one of the most unique and ambitious SF novels I’ve read of late, and I won’t be surprised to see it on awards lists (particularly the Nebula) later this year. Central Station is available now, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to see what the future of science fiction looks like.
Book Details
Title: Central Station
Author: Lavie Tidhar
First Published Date: May 2016
What I Read: ebook (Tachyon Publications)
Price I Paid: $0 (e-ARC via publisher)
MSRP: $15.95 pb / $9.99 ebook
ISBN/ASIN: 978-1616962142 / B01A5VHDEY
graycope14 said:
Sounds good to me. Good to read new words from you, too. I’ve been looking forward to a new Ironbombs post. Hoping all is well with you and not too battered, tattered, yellowed and creased.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Yes, I’ve been a bit lax in my duties… I have three other reviews pending, and one more book I’ve obligated myself to read before the end of the month. I shall return…
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Cavershamragu said:
Hmm, in the 80s, when I was reading NECROMANCER for the first time as well as PhilipK Dick et al, I would have leapt straight in – now I seem to find an SF / Fantasy framework less compelling, which may well just be laziness on my part but has probably more to do with the way I read (during a commute), which makes more esoteric reads tougher to do. Which is to say, really enjoyed the review Chris and will give this a go, right after I finally read that China Mieville tome that’s been staring balefully at me from the TBR for the last few years 🙂
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admiral.ironbombs said:
If I recall, that Mieville is Embassytown on your shelf — I think you would enjoy that one, it’s probably his best and one of his more accessible. (I also know what you mean, I find it harder to “dive in” to SF / Fantasy novels compared to a mystery / thriller when I’m only reading a few chapters each week, which is part of the reason it’s taken me forever to read and review this spring…)
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Cavershamragu said:
Thanks for that chum – actually, I have a feeling that the one I have is PERIOD STREET STATION – well, I really need to dig it out and make sure now 🙂
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fromcouchtomoon said:
I loved Tidhar’s OSAMA, and I keep seeing wonderful things about CENTRAL STATION. I will absolutely be reading this one in the coming year.
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admiral.ironbombs said:
I liked your review on OSAMA enough that I picked up a copy for £5, which was around $8… also picked up a few of Tidhar’s novella. This is one I thought you may enjoy because it’s so strange and refreshing compared to most mainstream, commercial SF, though it’s more character-focused and almost plotless.
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Jesse said:
This one is on my TBR. Yours is the first review I’ve read that attributes the storyline’s relative ambiguity to intention. Everyone else I’ve read so far believes it the result of interleaving a dozen or so short stories into a single narrative. Rather than a single closing moment, there are many, their collective impact dissipated by quantity. Do you truly believe it’s a novel? i guess I’ll have to read to answer for myself that question.
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Joachim Boaz said:
Perhaps we’re so used to 50s/60s fix-up novels that stuff like this feels “normal” — haha…
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admiral.ironbombs said:
Did you ever see the film Crash—not the Cronenberg but the ensemble drama? It reminded me of Central Station in that it abandoned traditional narrative structure to focus on thematic elements through the everyday lives of a handful of interconnected characters. With modernist and post-modernist elements becoming more common in SF, is it still a requirement that to be a “novel,” a book must have a defined narrative and/or plot arc (climax, denouement, etc)? Does that mean that Ulysses is not a novel, or would The Catcher in the Rye pass the test? I never read the stories, so I’m not entirely sure how well they worked as standalone pieces—I’m inclined to think they didn’t, as the book feels like it has more weight as one unit than the sum of its individual parts. But I found it had as much cohesion as something like City, The Martian Chronicles, Pavane, etc., all of which were similarly bound together by rough chronology and theme but not a defined narrative. And as Joachim points out I may be biased, I’ve read so many fix-ups that this feels more “normal” than most of the bloated, commercialized new SF I’ve tried to read 🙂
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John said:
Hola! I’ve been following your blog for a while now and finally
got the bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Humble
Texas! Just wanted to say keep up the excellent job!
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Grace said:
This looks like a great read! And the cover is a gorgeous throwback.
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uhclem48 said:
Rereading Central Station for a 3rd time, more convinced than ever that it’s a masterpiece. Here’s an Easter Egg for you that blew me away… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKmKLZOAT38
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