4.5 stars. Final review, first posted on Fantasy Literature:Central Station is a brilliantly imagined, vividly detailed world, where Lavie Tidhar stitches together concepts about scientific developments, the future of humanity, community and family, love, religion and individual choice, all at the same time. It’s an impressive and beautiful patchwork quilt; it’s just that there isn’t a whole lot of plot to it. Central Station is more focused on the ideas and the characters. But what scintillatin...

Welcome to the FutureLavie Tidhar's Central Station is a fantastic journey into the future. Filled with poetic imagery and complexity, Central Station takes place in and around a Spaceport in Tel Aviv some thousands of years hence. In a world filled with many changes, the question is what it means to be human and what it means to be other. From the birthing labs to the space colonies, the world is different. Old soldiers have had their parts slowly replaced over the centuries till they are robot...

Q: “Our maker who art in the zero point field, hallowed be thy nine billion names . . .” (c)Q: 'Under the eaves of the Central Station' (c) a world long since transformed lingers… Q: … 'the station like a heart, beating.'(c)The destinies of robots (or 'robotniks', as they call them part of the time here).Q: “We are beggars,” he said. “My kind. We are broken machines.” (c)In this world, battle robots are the new homeless. They speak Yiddish, the newly secret language. They wage battles, have feel...

"There’s no afterlife but the one we build ourselves.”Central Station is one of the most breathtakingly, bewilderingly, mindbendingly imaginative stories I've read in some time. In terms of sheer breadth and volume of ideas, it reminds me of Hannu Rajaniemi, but Tidhar's style is far more lyrical and dreamlike. The story takes place in in a future Tel Aviv, now the site of Central Station. Adaptoplant neighborhoods blossom and twist around each other. Robotniks, the lost souls of forgotten wars,...

This is a (post-)cyberpunk SF novel without a clear plotline, but with chapters (each from a new perspective), linked in a time-chain. The book was nominated for Literary and Arthur C. Clarke Awards and won John W. Campbell Memorial Award.There is a space port in Tel-Aviv, called the Central Station. A lot of humans, robot and gods live there, both in the real world and a virtuality. The story starts with a strange boy, who by his will power / magic / whatever changes the reality around, e.g. “A...

It'd been a while since I'd read some really good, original cyberpunk - and Tidhar's vision of a future Israel definitely qualifies. I'm upping my 'star rating' to a four because the setting of 'Central Station,' its conflicts and concerns, are so vivid, rich and enjoyable. However, this is a fix-up novel, and it shows. I'd read a couple of the segments in this book before, in somewhat different form, and said, "hmm" when I encountered them. At the end, there is a list of all the venues where ot...

Tel Aviv’s actual Central Bus Station is a labyrinthine hulk of crumbling concrete that looms Gormenghast-like over the poor, backwater neighbourhoods of south Tel Aviv. It’s a place begging to be written about. It thrives with ill life at the point beyond which it no longer matters if it’s abandoned, forgotten or given up on. The station crouches impervious amidst the looting and loitering, the heavy responsibility-wanting silence of those angry but too weak or sick to cry out, the invisible ru...

You know you've got a winner when:You keep saying to yourself, over and over and over, I hope this never ends, I hope this never ends.You get so deeply immersed in ideas, with so much world-building and awe and exploration of humanity, post-humanity, robot, evolutionary AI, and how everyone interacts, explores, and lives together pretty much harmoniously, that you cry and say, I live here. I will always live here. I have already been living here.You snap out of a nested story self-reference long...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Navel Gazing Novel: “Central Station” by Lavie Tidhar"The Shambleau called Carmel came to Central Station in spring, when the smell in the air truly is intoxicating. It is a smell of the sea, and of the sweat of so many bodies, their heat and their warmth, and it is the smell of humanity’s spices and the cool scent of its many machines." In “Central Station” by Lavie Tidhar This is a navel gazing novel; a friend of mine would say it's

Once, the world was young. The Exodus ships had only begun to leave the solar system then; the world of Heven had not been discovered; Dr. Novum had not yet come back from the stars. People still lived as they had always lived: in sun and rain, in and out of love, under a blue sky and in the Conversation, which is all about us, always. Very good novel that isn't actually a novel but a collection of sketches / cameos linked by location (the main Earth spaceport from the title) and by family ties

My 4th book by Lavie Tidhar this year; I think I have discovered a new favorite! I really admire his capacity to bounce from one end of the speculative fiction spectrum to another so smoothly, his always beautiful prose and his completely unbridled imagination. 4th, but definitely not last!In Earth’s space-faring future, Tel Aviv has become the literal central port for people going off planet, or coming back from human colonies across the solar system. This book is a little mosaic of what life i...

I received an ebook copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.Well then. That was interesting. I'm a little torn on my rating after finishing this. I mean, some of the concepts were brilliant and the world-building was quite phenomenal. But for most of the book I felt like the scene was being set but there really wasn't much happening. Then a lot of the stuff was beyond my comprehension, like so much science fiction that I've read lately seems to be (Peter F. Hamilton, Alastair Reyn...

I definitely liked bit of this story, but some of it just didn't work for me. I think this may be another case of a world which fascinates, and a character set that I couldn't engage with (kind of like my feelings for The Essex Serpent). What I did most enjoy about this book was seeing the progression of humanity into various types and blends of people/alien and bot. We have cool technology nodes that the majority of humans now have implemented into their brains, we have robots who work and cybo...

I have meant to read something by Tidhar for a long time, and this was my first opportunity. I know he writes in a variety of science fiction and fantasy subgenres. In this novel, Tel Aviv has become a crosspoint for even more of society - it is Earth's Central Station for the universe surrounding it. Humans have made a mass exodus to surrounding planets and moons, scientists have forced an evolutionary stage of humans that combines robotniks with humans (and all these groups are trying to live

A mosaic novel of Central Station, a major space port right next to Tel Aviv and set a couple of centuries into the future.The story follows a group of loosely connected individuals through a science fictional stew of a setting. We have a robot priest, a cyborg family matriarch, a prodigal son returning with a martian parasite, AIs called Others, a data vampire, a cyborg super soldier falling in love and children who may be in the process of transcendence. That's all on the back of a settled sol...

Central Station is a collection of intertwined short stories, stitched together to form a sort of mosaic novel about the residents of the titular far-future Tel Aviv spaceport.Tidhar pays homage to pretty much every golden age/pulp era SF writer you can think of, but the tone (gentler than his more provocative works) most recalls Clifford Simak, especially City.Though most of the Tidhar's stories stand alone, they also contain various plot threads that weave throughout the different perspective

Central Station is a "fix-up" novel of previously published short stories by Lavie Tidhar — stories which were always intended to be drawn together into a whole novel. It hints at huge changes and shifts for humanity while intimately focusing on the individuals; it's about a transformed human experience in the solar system, but stays in a single city. And it harks back to the feel of a golden age of SF with a distinctly retro vibe that is rich and imaginative. It manages to evoke the past and th...

Real Rating: 2.5* of five, rounded up because it's not poorly written, it's just that I don't care at allI'm still unable to articulate the source of my dissatisfaction with Central Station. I don't understand why it isn't working for me, but I'm Pearl-Ruling it at 61%, the end of Achimwene and Carmel's story.I do not wish to continue reading, so I am not going to make myself.

I probably never would have read Central Station at all if not for the fact that this year's r/Fantasy Bingo had a cyberpunk square. I hate the very thought of cyberpunk. Oppressive high tech societies? No thanks. So in the oldest tradition of Bingo, I went out in search of edge cases. Oddities. This was one of the candidates I couldn't quite choose between - then I saw it in a bookstore and it was decided. And I couldn't be more glad I did. A group of disgruntled house appliances watched the

I received an Advanced Reader Copy from the publisher through NetGallery, and this is my first read of Tidhar's works.Lavie Tidhar used a mix of past religious figures to create a complicated future.This story is created of hope and lost of hope. Souls that are forgotten and try to be remembered, to be known.A strange politic and history of wars and faith creates new intelligent beings and the purpose of their creation is now forgotten.Human and non human live with and at the same time without e...