Central Station

Starred review from February 15, 2016
World Fantasy Award–winner Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming) magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel set under the towering titular spaceport. In a future border town formed between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa, cyborg ex-soldiers deliver illicit drugs for psychic vampires, and robot priests give sermons and conduct circumcisions. The Chong family struggles to save patriarch Vlad, lost in the inescapable memory stream they all share, thanks to his father’s hack of the Conversation, the collective unconscious. New children, born from back-alley genetic engineering, begin to experience actual and virtual reality simultaneously. Family and faith bring them all back and sustain them. Tidhar gleefully mixes classic SF concepts with prose styles and concepts that recall the best of world literature. The byways of Central Station ring with dusty life, like the bruising, bustling Cairo streets depicted by Naguib Mahfouz. Characters wrestle with problems of identity forged under systems of oppression, much as displaced Easterners and Westerners do in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. And yet this is unmistakably SF. Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.

Starred review from March 15, 2016

In the shadow of an enormous space terminal, in between the modern city of New Tel Aviv and the old Arab port of Jaffa, lies Central Station. This small community has always been a melting pot of people trying to get by and get along, and that remains the reality in the far future. Families such as the Jones and the Chongs have lived there for generations, but in the post-Singularity they share the city with robots left over from forgotten wars, oracles that have chosen to become more other than human, and children being bred to exist both in the human and in the information streams. Now there are new factors influencing Central Station, including a vampire infected with a virus that drives her to feed on the data of those around her. Considering this is essentially a stitch-up novel, pulled together from short stories penned by the author over a decade, it has a strong cohesive feel, with each tale building the portrait of a fascinating future glimpsed through the lens of a tight-knit community. VERDICT Tidhar (A Man Lies Dreaming; The Violent Century) changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.--MM

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