Central Station by Lavie Tidhar

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper. When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris' ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik--a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return. Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation--a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness--are just the beginning of irrevocable change. At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive ... and even evolve.

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com.

My one and only problem with Central Station is that there didn't seem to be a point to it. It didn't have an overall story arc. It was more like a series of short stories set in the same world featuring the same characters. It got to the point around 75% of the way through where I still didn't know what the end game was. The book didn't feel like it was leading up to something. It was just a series of stories.

But even then each chapter didn't feel like an individual short story. It was more like a little information about the character, maybe a little backstory and whatever else was going on. But I have to say the characters were interesting. You have one who is basically a Trill from Star Trek. You have a number of robots left begging for parts after the war they were built for ended. And you have what is basically a vampire. Who was infected with a virus which was created as a weapon for said war and makes them want to drink blood and take memories. I really liked the “vampires” in this book, I liked that there was a reason for them being there and it wasn't just “oh yeah there are vampire in this version of the future”. I would have been happy if the whole book was just about the vampires.

I will say this, the world building was fantastic, it felt like a properly fleshed out world. It's set in a futuristic Tel Aviv where at some point a spaceport was built allowing travel to Mars and further out into the solar system. The characters you met felt real, they felt like they belonged in the spaceport. But the actual story was boring. And the story is kind of important when it comes to books.

A good book like this always seems too short

Central Station is a middle Eastern border city, a huge spaceport between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Space travel is but a tiny element of the book though, as Tidhar is more interested in these scrabbling to survive at the foot of the gleaming towers. If there's a throughline to the novel, it's the Chong family and their affiliates - the book follows various Chongs, with the most pagetime given to Boris, recently returned to Earth from space. His lovers, father, cousins and various other connections (an artist who makes and kills gods, a rag and bone man who may well be immortal, a young woman infected with a disease akin to vampirism that makes her thirst for data) all take centre stage for a while before fading back into the mass of humanity that makes up Central Station. And that's really my only gripe with this book. You can throw around phrases like “mosaic novel”, or “collage fiction”, but there is no escaping that this book is a collection of short stories loosely lashed together. There's no overarching plot (well, there are hints of something in the background), several dangling threads and not a great deal of action. But what you do get is an outstanding depiction of this new society. Tidhar has created something recognisably human, yet quite alien at the same time. It reminds me in some ways of Ian MacDonald's great SF novels set in the world's emerging economies where the shock of the new is multiplied by our Western unfamiliarity with existing cultures and mores. The writing is tremendously evocative of this future culture. You will taste the dust of Central Station in the back of your throat by the time you finish. It's a book that has lingered in my mind, probably one of the best SF novels that will be published in 2016, but not one to be read for quick thrills.

[I received an ARC of this book from Tachyon via NetGalley]