A pair of fresh reviews and another award nomination for Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner CENTRAL STATION.  

Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013

For NUMBER 71, Dan Hartland praises the book.

Let us cease this charade: Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION must win the Arthur C Clarke Award of 2017.

I say this without having yet completed the shortlist; but the notion that a work as important or lyrical or entertaining has been published in the last five benighted years of science fiction seems unlikely, much less that by chance two, like iridescent buses, have come along at once. Here is a linked series of short stories, ones published in many cases years apart and miles away, rethreaded with additions and dilations into not so much a whole as a tesselation. This is the anthology as mosaic, the collection as gauzed screen. In the gaps of these careful overlappings, you understand, is the work’s singularity.

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It’s worth saying that CENTRAL STATION also exhibits all the gleeful perversity for which, perhaps because of its gross-out prominence in works like the Hitler-gumshoe fable A MAN LIES DREAMING, Tidhar has already created a rather bigger name than he has won for his wisdom. Here we encounter a “Golda Meir automaton [which] journeyed to ancient Mars-That Never-Was, and changed from the course of a planet” [p. 53]; we hear a player who died in-game crow, “That was awesome! […] Flatlined! In a singularity! I won;’t have to buy drinks for months!” [p. 200]; and we learn that Ogko, to whom there is a shrine almost everywhere in the world of Central Station, “cheerfully admitted … [he] was a liar” [p. 72]. Tidhar has given up none of his humour; rather, he has worked it into a wider worldview.

INFINITE TEXT enjoys the novel.

What amazes me is that Tidhar managed to create entities so different from us and somehow breathe air into their lungs and humanize them giving them relatable cravings and vices. 

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To me this story is representative of the whole. Tidhar takes something so distant from us and makes it relatable. As readers we empathize with the non-human and that is the result of great craftsmanship and storytelling. I absolutely love this book and I will read it again soon.

Also, the cover art for this novel is so beautiful. This is the work of Sarah Anne Langton.

The British Fantasy Society announced the nominees for the 2017 British Fantasy Awards. Among those honored was CENTRAL STATION cover artist Sarah Anne Langton. 

Best Artist

• Ben Baldwin
• Evelinn Enoksen
• Sarah Anne Langton
• Daniele Serra

Congratulations to all the nominees.

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton