Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013

At the Polish site CZYTANKA NA DOBRANOC, Karolina Sulinska Escudo enjoys Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION.

CENTRAL STATION is one of the most breathtaking, surprising and imaginary stories I’ve read. The style of the author reminds me of the prose of Hannu Rajaniemi, although it is more lyrical and imaginative. Tidhar in his latest novel merged the previously published stories. It’s back to the golden age of SF with a distinct retro note that makes the imaginary world incredibly colorful and rich. It combines the past with the future and makes the reader feel the longing for other works of this genre. Ba, even behind those unread. 

Polish edition

CENTRAL STATION is really a great book, but you can not approach it with the assumption that we hit a work of art, because it is a truly special novel, which will also receive a wide circle of critics. It seems to me that the idea for the book was the idea of ​​creating another, new and futuristic world, and the story itself was marginalized. This novel was made up of fragments of finished stories, which the author decided to loosely connect with each other. Each of the stories told is interesting, but there is no main motive to push the narrative forward. You can see the structure here, but we’re going to lose all the pleasure of reading so deeply. Because it’s not the heroes, not the events are important only the reality in which they play out. These stories are narrated in isolation from the events described, from a distance, which in practice limits and often even excludes the involvement of heroes. Often unfinished, taken out of context, are only part of a larger puzzle-picture of the future world. However, I will add that narration also plays an important role in this book, is an additional factor in the world of knowledge.

Tidhar has absorbed and digested so many science fiction genres to finally give us something new and innovative, something I have not met so far, a book in which you hear echoes of reading from the past. Spectacular, often poetic, prose made me unable to break away from her. I was so absorbed in the details of the world that I exposed, that practically to the last page I did not notice the lack of a plot. For me it was sensational and without it. Must read.

(Translation from Polish courtesy of Google)

The Portuguese site RASCUNHOS praises the novel.

Futurist, presenting the next step of human evolution in which one is born already with connections that allow the transmission of data, nevertheless achieves a somewhat reticent vision, with positive points but without great euphoria, in a scenario decadent in which humans continue to have their existential doubts, their intersections and communication failures. A story both futuristic and human;

(Translation from Portuguese courtesy of Google)

The Czech edition of CENTRAL STATION (CENTRÁLNÍ STANICE) is coming out in December from Argo.

For more info about CENTRAL STATION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton