tel aviv

August 11, 2017

Lavie Tidhar’s groundbreaking CENTRAL STATION is relevant now

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized asimov's science fiction, central station, ian sales, it doesn't have to be right..., lavie tidhar, norman spinrad, pile by the bed, rascunhos, review, sarah anne langton, science fiction, tel aviv

Reviews for Lavie Tidhar’s John W. Campbell Award winning CENTRAL STATION keep coming.

In ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION (September/October 2017), Norman Spinrad praises the novel.

This is an unusual and groundbreaking novel, at least for me. CENTRAL STATION is that rara avis, a novel cobbled together from previously published stories that really works as a novel. CENTRAL STATION is the only novel written in English that is mostly set in a future Tel Aviv. CENTRAL STATION is also one of the best, most unusual, and convincing depictions of human-cyborg-robot-AI interactions I’ve read or heard of.

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But in CENTRAL STATION Lavie Tidhar does something congruent with form that works brilliantly in this novel be cause of the stories he is telling. The Conversation is a multi-consciousness mish-mash in the conscious perceptions of everyone, attention jumping back and forth between times and memories, and Tidhar jumps around in points of view, non-linear time packets, ongoing bits of intertwined story lines, because that is the nature of human consciousness in this fictional future.

For once the medium really is the message.

PILE BY THE BED enjoys the book.

Tidhar uses these stories to explore a number of well worn science fiction tropes – humans interconnected through a system called the Conversation, virtual reality, cyborgs created to fight global wars, sentient artificial intelligences, a robot religion (complete with robot priest), and a data vampire. But he manages to make this exploration in a humanist way and a way that is relevant now, despite the science fiction stylings. Each of his characters, despite their short time in the spotlight are interesting and so it does not matter that many of their stories do not quite resolve.

CENTRAL STATION is at times more soap opera than space opera, with the various interconnections between characters. With the exception of a military flashback it contains few of the big action or big idea set pieces of books of this type. Instead it is often quiet and contemplative, similar in that way to Becky Chambers’ recent novels. And all the better for that.

Photo: Kevin Nixon. © Future Publishing 2013

Ian Sales at IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE RIGHT… reviews CENTRAL STATION.

CENTRAL STATION is a well-crafted piece of science fiction, with visible writing chops in evidence, and such books seem all too rare in the genre these days…

The Portuguese site RASCUNHOS lauds the tale.

With a little touch of irony about the extent of technology (which produces chatter lifts to which crew members want to escape, but can not do so until they reach their destination) CENTRAL STATION features humans who have merged with technology but still Human beings, CENTRAL STATION- with passions and fears, with disagreements and with the passing of certain ethical barriers by curiosity, but also with altruistic characters.

Slightly chaotic and gloomy in atmosphere, CENTRAL STATION is above all a human story in a distant future where the technology is extensive but does not present a glamorous glamor , rather an evolution of possibilities that seem so strange to us as to the characters that show observation and consideration.

(Translation from Portuguese courtesy of Google.)

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

Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

February 26, 2016

CENTRAL STATION is a fascinating glimpse into a very possible future

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized central station, civilian reader, gem in the rough, lavie tidhar, metapunk, review, science fiction, tel aviv

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

August 17, 2015

At last, a cover to Lavie Tidhar’s CENTRAL STATION

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized central station, cover, elizabeth story, lavie tidhar, news, science fiction, tel aviv

It can now be revealed! Here’s the sensational cover to Lavie Tidhar’s forthcoming CENTRAL STATION.

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover Miriam is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the data stream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin Isobel is infatuated with a robotnik—a cyborg ex-Israeli soldier who might well be begging for parts. Even his old flame Carmel—a hunted data-vampire—has followed him back to a planet where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above all is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful entities who, through the Conversation—a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness—are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

In April, 2016, everything changes with CENTRAL STATION.

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

Cover design by Elizabeth Story

July 6, 2015

World Fantasy Award Winner Lavie Tidhar set to explore CENTRAL STATION

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized 2016, central station, collection, lavie tidhar, mars, niall alexander, science fiction, tel aviv, tor.com, zeno literary agency

Last week the Zeno Literacy Agency announced the acclaimed Lavie Tidhar’s new book CENTRAL STATION.

On March 15th, 2016, Tachyon Publications will publish Lavie Tidhar‘s CENTRAL STATION. An anthology of connected stories, this is the first time they will be collected in a single volume. Here’s the synopsis…

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.

When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. But his vast, extended family continues to pull him back home.

Boris’s ex-lover Miriam is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the data stream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin Isobel is infatuated with a robotnik — a cyborg ex-Israeli soldier who might well be begging for parts. Even his old flame Carmel — a hunted data-vampire — has followed him back to a planet where she is forbidden to return.

Rising above all is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful entities who, through the Conversation — a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness — are just the beginning of irrevocable change.

On his own site, Tidar had this to say about the forthcoming book.

I began CS in 2010 while living in Tel Aviv, and continued it over the next few years. The first CS story was published in 2011, and the stories were published in a variety of places, with several appearing consecutively in Interzone. They have also kept cropping up in the various Year’s Bests anthologies. I finished the last one at the end of 2014. In a way, CS both represents everything I have to say about the shape of science fiction – and a large part of it is a sort of dialogue with older (mostly, admittedly, quite obscure) SF – and a way of talking about the present. It is set in the old central bus station area in south Tel Aviv, currently home to a quarter of a million poor economic migrants from Asia, and African refugees, and I wanted to explore that area through the lens of science fiction (one of the weird things I found recently is that the fictional sort of “federal” political vision of Israel/Palestine I have in the book is now being touted as a real solution by a group of political activists). My other ambition was to write a book which was mostly about character interaction: about extended families, about relationships, in which the “shiny” science fiction future serves as a sort of background rather than taking centre stage. My other inspiration was that I always wanted to write a novel in short stories. Science fiction has a long tradition of doing this – from The Martian Chronicles to Lord of Light – but my inspiration was also partly V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street.

Tachyon have been amazing to work with so far. I’ve got to spend this month on some heavy editing, but the result of this will be that CENTRAL STATION will be, essentially, an actual novel, I think – the way I intended it from the start.

The forthcoming CENTRAL STATION excites Niall Alexander at TOR.COM.

Tidhar went into a bit more detail about the project, and its origins, on his blog. Begun in 2010, when he was still living in Tel Aviv, and finished—excepting “some heavy editing”—in 2014,Central Station “represents everything I have to say about the shape of science fiction.”

“A large part of it is a sort of dialogue with older (mostly, admittedly, quite obscure) SF.” The remainder? Why, “a way of talking about the present,” because if we’re honest, for all its speculative bells and whistles, that’s what science fiction is for.

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The result of this commingling of ambitions, CENTRAL STATION , will be published by Tachyon Publications in the States in the spring of 2016. There’s been no news of a UK deal to date, but it’s difficult to picture a world in which Tidhar’s publishing partner on The Violent Century and A Man Lies Dreaming, namely Hodder & Stoughton, doesn’t pick up the project shortly.

Tachyon is publishing the ONLY English language edition and the book will be available in the UK.

More details to come…