Lavie Tidhar’s NEOM continues its assault on the best of 2022 lists
NEOM, Lavie Tidhar’s long awaited return to the universe of the John W. Campbell Award Winner CENTRAL STATION, remains prominent with inclusion on best of 2022 rankings by The Speculative Shelf and Los Angeles Public Library, not to mention positive reviews from Scrapping and Playing, Jake Casella Brookins, and Garik16’s SciFi/Fantasy Reviews and Other Thoughts.
This was superb and I’m in awe of Tidhar’s vision. He’s conjured up a futuristic city that feels simultaneously ultramodern and also run down. The rich histories of the region and its cultures are seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of this fully-realized world.
The Speculative Shelf
NEOM is a thoughtful, beautifully written story about what we have, what we want, how we achieve our desires, and what, and whom, are we willing to risk for our own benefit.
Los Angeles Public Library
A novel that kept me reading, moved me to tears for an old automaton being destroyed, love the characters.
Scrapping and Playing
I enjoyed it, found it entertaining but it also made me think as the descriptions of NEOM are so similar to those of our world.
it can be read as a stand-alone but I would recommend to read Central Station to appreciate all the nuances of this story.
I strongly recommend it
This is great! Like CENTRAL STATION, a fascinating blend of huge and tiny ideas; quiet and believable, shot through with vivid oddness, and chock-full of allusion to other works. Highly recommended.
Jake Casella Brookins
And NEOM tells these stories beautifully, whether that be of the Robot (who probably gets the most time in page-length) and its quest, or of Mariam simply doing her jobs and encountering all these oddities…as well as encountering a man in Nasir who might actually be interested in giving her some company, or of Elias as he learns more about himself and the world…be that friendship, or the strangeness of other humans and creatures, or more. The setting remains utterly delightfully weird at times – Jackals with personality who can talk, strange hermits seemingly on the spectrum in the Desert who live on trade, abandoned spaceships, robots broken apart by war, terror artists creating art through mass destruction, etc. etc. But Tidhar infuses all of these oddball aspects of the setting with depth and life and with such great dialogue such that they’re both delightful to read about and never feel like something artificial and weird just for the sake of being weird.
Garik16’s SciFi/Fantasy Reviews and Other Thoughts