Though several months from its November publication, excitement abounds for NEOM, Lavie Tidhar’s long awaited return to the universe of the John W. Campbell Award Winner CENTRAL STATION, with reviews and mentions from John Folk-Williams from SciFi Mind, File 770‘s Mike Glyer, and Civilian Reader. NEOM is currently available for pre-order from all finer booksellers and directly from Tachyon.

In the helpful afterward to his hauntingly beautiful new novel, NEOM, Lavie Tidhar describes his process of writing it as one of discovery. He wrote about a robot going to the flower market of the bustling city of Neom to buy a single rose. But why? He had to write another story to answer that question. Then the robot went into the desert looking for something – that led to a story to find out what he discovered there. And so Tidhar says he realized that he was writing a novel all along.

His process of writing Neom is quite like the stories of its characters – trying to answer questions about who they are, what they are doing, the purposes in life they have or lack. So many are trying to fill in what they feel is missing, and that helps give their stories a quality of subdued intensity, a sort of quietly urgent need that never feels like despair because there is hope in everything they do, a hope for a new or fuller, more purposeful life. This is an entrancing novel about those on the margins of a glittering future city.

SciFi Mind

This is a book of hearts and of the heart, be it human or robot, and that is something that is universal, be it ourselves or in “the other”. The “other”, in Tidhar’s work, is us, and we are the other. We are all us, and in NEOM, we feel for that other, in the personage of the robots, in the human characters, and we take them, and their stories, into us.

File 770

A new novel set in the same universe as the multi-award winning CENTRAL STATION. Tidhar is a superb author, so it really doesn’t matter to me what he writes — I’ll still happily read it.

Civilian Reader