Reviews and comments about Lavie Tidhar’s forthcoming novel CENTRAL STATION keep rolling in.

GEM IN THE ROUGH awards the novel 5 gems.

Okay, I know up until now I’ve been talking about ‘technology this’ and ‘technology’ that on this book, but to be fair Tidhar does a great job in focusing on the community too. People are still heading over to Mama Jones’ bar to grab a drink of arak.  Generations of families and refugees have stayed in Central Station, it’s a place where people still have face to face contact. The human connection is still slightly there; if anything, people use the Conversation to gauge a person’s actual feelings and possibly any other background information needed for that current interaction.

CENTRAL STATION is a sci-fi opera story that stays on Earth. This book may not have the shooting lasers and adrenaline space chases that pepper “successful” sci-fi today, but if you want something close to home, a collective story of people, technology, and the connections that bind us, digitally or not, read this book.

Not to be outdone, METAPUNK rates the book 10/10.

The novel is a collection of lives at a very vibrant and strange place. A place that very well could be one day exist on earth and the lives described could very well be lived in the future. We meet a single mother, rasing a child that was hacked together from public domain and stolen genes by a former lover of hers. The boy, Kranki,  himself is odd and exists both in the offline and online word at the same time, but without agmentation. A family linked together by memories stretching generations because of a modification the patriarch of the familiy made to him and the genes he passed on generations ago. A robot priest and a soldier killed in action, revived as a robotnik (cyborged soldier). Both are by now centuries ol and remember wars that no longer even have names.

Lavie Tidhar gives enormous depth to the world he creates, there are subcultures of various modified humans (as a Cthulhu fanboy I was particularly delighted by the tentacle freaks), the Conversation, which is in short a Solar-System-wide internet with sentient entities existing only in there (like Kranki’s best friend) and which holds strange dangers for many. Almost all of humanity is connected to and in this conversation and everybody is always surrounded by its buzz. Almost everybody is part of a constant flow of information.

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CENTRAL STATION is a fascinating glimpse into a very possible future which creates a lot of craving for a follow up.

CIVILIAN READER praises the cover by Sarah Anne Langton.

Ok, I already have this, and featured it in a Books Received post a couple months back. But, today Tachyon unveiled that superb new cover, above, for Lavie Tidhar’s highly-anticipated new book, CENTRAL STATION. It’s comprised of a series of novellas/short stories, stitched together to create a larger story. It sounds fantastic and, while the previous cover was also really nice, now it also looks magnificent. 

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

Cover and poster by Sarah Anne Langton