Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by squid_vicious
Central Station by Lavie Tidhar
5.0
My 4th book by Lavie Tidhar this year; I think I have discovered a new favorite! I really admire his capacity to bounce from one end of the speculative fiction spectrum to another so smoothly, his always beautiful prose and his completely unbridled imagination. 4th, but definitely not last!
In Earth’s space-faring future, Tel Aviv has become the literal central port for people going off planet, or coming back from human colonies across the solar system. This book is a little mosaic of what life is like in the shadow of the enormous Central Station, a strange place where ancient buildings and traditions co-exist, sometimes uneasily, with the newer technologies, where families come together and are pulled apart and where cultures blend but never lose their distinctive flavors.
There isn’t really a plot to be found in the pages of “Central Station”, or that much exposition, either. Tidhar writes of this far-future Earth by assuming that humanity endures and adapts – for better or for worse. What kept me glued to the page was the incredibly creative world-building: religious robots, jobless cyborg soldiers, data-vampires… Tidhar is clearly fascinated by the concept of transhumanism, and he imagined various strange ways such things could unfold and evolve when the tech used to “evolve” people becomes obsolete. He explores this world through the connections between two families living by Central Stations: the Chongs and the Jones. But to these people, family does not necessarily mean blood ties, expanding this story to show that people are much more connected than they think, even without being plugged into a huge network of digital consciousness.
The stuff in this book can be grimy at times: there is plenty of dirty, misery and blood to go around, but there is also something strangely luminous about this world, where love and faith still hold an important place in people’s heart, and where the definition of humanity is broader than one could have imagined. Obviously, I loved it, and would have loved it even more if the book had been longer.
In Earth’s space-faring future, Tel Aviv has become the literal central port for people going off planet, or coming back from human colonies across the solar system. This book is a little mosaic of what life is like in the shadow of the enormous Central Station, a strange place where ancient buildings and traditions co-exist, sometimes uneasily, with the newer technologies, where families come together and are pulled apart and where cultures blend but never lose their distinctive flavors.
There isn’t really a plot to be found in the pages of “Central Station”, or that much exposition, either. Tidhar writes of this far-future Earth by assuming that humanity endures and adapts – for better or for worse. What kept me glued to the page was the incredibly creative world-building: religious robots, jobless cyborg soldiers, data-vampires… Tidhar is clearly fascinated by the concept of transhumanism, and he imagined various strange ways such things could unfold and evolve when the tech used to “evolve” people becomes obsolete. He explores this world through the connections between two families living by Central Stations: the Chongs and the Jones. But to these people, family does not necessarily mean blood ties, expanding this story to show that people are much more connected than they think, even without being plugged into a huge network of digital consciousness.
The stuff in this book can be grimy at times: there is plenty of dirty, misery and blood to go around, but there is also something strangely luminous about this world, where love and faith still hold an important place in people’s heart, and where the definition of humanity is broader than one could have imagined. Obviously, I loved it, and would have loved it even more if the book had been longer.