From today until October 10th, Tachyon Publications is running a CENTRAL STATION giveaway on Goodreads! CENTRAL STATION is the latest novel by critically-acclaimed, multi-award winning author Lavie Tidhar. Up for grabs is a signed hardcover of the novel. 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. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper.
When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris’s ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik — a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return.
Rising above them 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 alien entities who, through the Conversation — a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness — are just the beginning of irrevocable change.
At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive… and even evolve.
CENTRAL STATION won the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner, was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and longlisted for the British Science Fiction Award. In addition, it was selected as a best-of-year novel by NPR and Barnes & Noble, a best-of-month by Amazon, and was included on Locus’s Recommended Reading List. The cover also won the 2016 British Science Fiction Award Best Cover Illustration, for artist Sarah Anne Langton.
The novel has been published in the UK by PS Publishing.
Here are just a few of the reviews the novel has received…
‘Magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel set under the towering titular spaceport… Tidhar gleefully mixes classic SF concepts with prose styles and concepts that recall the best of world literature. The byways of Central Station ring with dusty life, like the bruising, bustling Cairo streets depicted by Naguib Mahfouz. Characters wrestle with problems of identity forged under systems of oppression, much as displaced Easterners and Westerners do in the novels of Orhan Pamuk. And yet this is unmistakably SF. Readers of all persuasions will be entranced.’ — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
‘It is just this side of a masterpiece — short, restrained, lush — and the truest joy of it is in the way Tidhar scatters brilliant ideas like pennies on the sidewalk.’ — NPR
‘The stories include some of Tidhar’s most beautiful prose, and his future Tel Aviv is among the most evocative settings in recent SF… Somehow, CENTRAL STATION combines a cultural sensibility too long invisible in SF with a sensibility which is nothing but classic SF, and the result is a rather elegant suite of tales.’ — Locus
‘CENTRAL STATION, by the talented Lavie Tidhar, is a mindbending mosaic novel.’ — Locus (2016 Year in Review)
‘It might seem like Lavie Tidhar is such a major figure by now that discussing him under international SF is hardly necessary, but his somewhat novelized storysuite CENTRAL STATION is so engaged with Israeli culture that it seems appropriate, even though it’s also a wonderful tribute to classic SF both in form (the fix-up) and content…’ — Gary K. Wolfe, Locus (2016 Year in Review)
‘CENTRAL STATION is without question the best assemblage of short stories I’ve read in recent memory. Sublimely sensual, emotionally moreish, and composed with crystalline clarity irrespective of its incredible complexity.’ — Tor.com
‘[Tidhar] has created a textured and original future that echoes real historical and economic tensions while satisfying veteran readers with deliberate echoes of classic science fiction… Deeply humane.’ — Chicago Tribune
‘Powerfully imagined and beautifully rendered… capture[s] profound emotional truths…’ — Interzone