Central Station

by Lavie Tidhar

Other authorsJacob Weisman (Editor), Jill Roberts (Editor), Elizabeth Story (Designer)

Paperback, 2016

Status

Available

Call number

PR9510.T53

Series

Central Station (1)

Genres

Science Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Tachyon (San Francisco, 2016). 1st edition, 1st printing. 288 pages. $15.95.

Description

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. Boris' 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.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member RobertDay

There have been science fiction novels before that have tried to illustrate everyday life in the future. It's actually hard to pull that trick off, because all too often the writer attempts to shoe-horn all sorts of ideas into the book that just don't ring true, especially a few years down the line

when it turns out that the future isn't as different as we expected. We see this now.If I'd read a novel when I was 14 about everyday life in the early 21st Century, I'd be excited by the computers, the Web, the mobile phones and the high-definition televisions connecting me to the world. But I'd be unimpressed by the absence of flying cars, silver suits and personal jetpacks. And I'd perhaps be surprised to find in that novel that many of us still live in the same houses, we catch buses or trains to work, we still read books (at least some of us), use utensils in our everyday lives that have been unchanged for centuries, and have things around us that are very old as well as brand new. (I have crockery and drinking glasses in particular that I know are a good sixty years old.) This isn't how we were told the future would be (and a good thing too, many would say).

Lavie Tidhar's 'Central Station' is a book that depicts a future as lived by ordinary people. They do things and have lives that are radically changed from our own; but at the same time, they live in spaces, and use things, that we would recognise; indeed, I'm sure that if you dived down to some of the scenes in the book, you would find things - the glasses in Miriam Jones' shebeen, the books in Achimwene's collection - that are with us now. And that is the great thing about this personal narrative, told in fourteen short stories, interlinked by characters and (in particular) the place. There is a tremendous sense of continuity, of how lives might be lived two hundred or so years from now.

There are differences, of course. Humanity has colonised space and travel to other worlds is comparatively commonplace. The virtual world has grown, and has become more seamlessly integrated with the biological. And human biology has been amended to adopt and adapt to these changes, sometimes in ways that seem to rob people of their humanity (except it doesn't, despite everything).

For some readers, the setting will seem the most fantastical part of the story - a spaceport built above the post-Israeli city of Tel Aviv. How we got there from here is not part of the story; there have been wars and peaces, and we get glimpses of the ruins of the Israel/Palestine we see today. But there is no sense that there has been any major dislocation of peoples; the region remains the melting pot it always was, and the building of Central Station in particular, an event just fading in human memory at the time of the book, acted as a magnet to draw people in from a range of different cultures. All have contributed to a diverse, vibrant city, though one not without its problems.

This is not a book of action and adventure. Some of the characters have lived lives that would be incredible to us - think Roy Batty's closing speech in Blade Runner, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...", though in Central Station, the characters would believe these things whilst recognising their wondrousness - but it is a book that rings true. The author was born in Israel and has lived all over the world. It shows in the lives he brings to our attentions; perhaps for a white, middle-aged British reader, this is as much a part of the fantastical picture as anything else. As someone once said, Earth is the alien planet.

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LibraryThing member andreas.wpv

Quite enjoyed this: a silent, futuristic, not fantastic science fiction. Language reminiscent of the flowery expressions like Rafik Schami or some Salman Rushdie. Gentle, slow, focusing not on persons really but on being human, perhaps what it means being human.

Not a real plot, perhaps, but lives

interwoven in a story of stories, flowing rather acting, with sentences sprouting words in all directions weaving lives together.

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LibraryThing member AltheaAnn

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 other segments were previously published - it's most of the book. There's nothing wrong with having what's essentially a collection of short stories with a twisting strand of plot tying them together - but at times some of the different stories felt like puzzle pieces awkwardly shoved into spaces that didn't quite fit.

Even then, though - I still liked the stories. What I mainly took away from 'Central Station' was its sense of history and community, how even as technology changes what it means to be human, and even as social injustice and all the weaknesses of humanity persist through those changes, a city is still a rich tapestry full of life, with all of its inhabitants' wonderful quirks, their loves, their dreams, their connections.

I'll definitely be following this author in the future.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Tachyon for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinions are solely my own.

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LibraryThing member Glennis.LeBlanc

This is a set of interlocking short stories that take place in Tel Aviv of the future. There is a space station above it so it is a hub of travel for people coming from the colonies to return home. The stories all are connected to one family that lives there. Most of the stories have been published

before but a few are new to this collection. It isn’t all life and death stories some are quiet gems about birth, death, and religion. This isn’t a huge sprawling world you see, it is a close to home slice of the future and is rather fun to read how we will change as a society because of what we did when we fought wars, came up with new technologies and met new species. I did like that even in the far future there were still book collectors. And enjoyable read and makes me want to pick up more of the author’s stuff.

Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

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LibraryThing member datrappert

Astounding. This is my fourth book by Tidhar, and he may be the greatest living writer. His imagination seems to know no bounds and he doesn't write the same book over and over. This one stems from a series of short stories, which have been revised and augmented to tell the story of a space port in

Tel Aviv. It takes a few pages to get into the swing of things, because this is a future that takes a bit of getting used to, but soon Tidhar's large cast of characters begin to take hold in your affections and you watch with interest and emotion as they go about with their lives in a future world where everyone--well, almost everyone--is connected through an implanted node into a sort of uber-internet that spans not only Earth but Earth's far-flung outposts on Mars, the asteroid belt, Saturn's moon Titan, and out into the galaxy. There isn't a single overriding plot here, but the interconnections between the characters and the events paint a very vivid picture of the worlds Tidhar has created. This is not cold science fiction. Despite the cleverness of his ideas, Tidhar's work is grounded in character, and that is why Central Station succeeds on all fronts and may even bring a tear or two to your eyes.

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LibraryThing member BraveNewBks

3.5 stars.

The world-building is impressive. Everything from the micro (patented eye colors) to the macro (new world religions) to the fantastic (vampires!) has been carefully remained and integrated.
Unfortunately, this felt like a series of short stories set in the same world rather than a

coherent novel. Though there's some overlap, it seemed that most chapters had their own primary characters; I would have preferred to see the author take one or two or three of these characters and develop an overarching story. In some ways, this is The Silmarilion of this world, where I was hoping for The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.

I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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LibraryThing member bhutton

A fascinating set of interlinked short stories. So much depth giving hints of the wider solar system wide society while remaining anchored to the central station, the unspoken heart of the stories. There is such a sense of space never directly explained but sketched out by the stories that are told

and how they interact with the Station. Beautiful prose and makes the most of its narrative limits. Not all the stories hit but the imagery and world building make up for any failings in the plots.

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LibraryThing member antao

"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 a novel about the human condition. Back in the day, this was the stuff that interested me less. But they say SF at its best is allegorical and because contemporary versions are all about we live in navel gazing times, this one was much up my alley. Quoting from “Blade Runner”, in one of the most wonderful Roy Batty lines, just so you know how geeky I am: "I've felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I've seen it...felt it!", one can sense what makes us human even in a SF milieu. This existential part is what makes the genre so appealing to me. I wonder when they will do a film based on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars stuff? It has to be high-quality to do justice, casting & special effects both, so it’s going cost a bunch, also there are some themes they might not want to show the masses at this stage, perhaps that is some factor why, surprisingly, they haven't tried a film yet... big bucks to be made though if they do it well! How will you cram, what, 1500 pages of well-crafted prose into 90 minutes of Hollywood glitz? We all remember what happened to e.g. "Dune" when they tried that.

Even if we ignore ancient stories that could be categorised as SF (e.g. guy goes voyaging for golden fleece, gains it by sweet-talking girl for advice on how to avoid the guardian monster, marries her and has children, ditches her and sacrifices their children to escape, wife becomes justifiably homicidal and wreaks vengeance from a dragon-drawn chariot...) and go straight for the academically agreed "first ever" science fiction story - Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus - it's generally been about the characters. For every 9 books of the Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (did someone think Asimov?) variety there's a “Venus Plus X”. And here we are, decades later, still making the "but then 90% of everything is crap" protestations, and still fighting the critical ignorance that insists that SF is all about rocket ships and ray guns. Of course a lot of it is. For the same reason that you recognise the names Jackie Collins and Dan Brown - because schlock sells. I'm just pointing out myself that "new wave" was a term used to describe the type of SF going way back to the 60s and that nothing really has changed since - there still remain new SF books worth investing the time taken to read and those that make you wish you hadn't. There are still those that examine "the human condition", some that contrast by examining "the non-human condition" and those that ignore both to concentrate on the technical issues. And in each of those groups, the same old 90/10 ratio of crap to gems. The same as every other branch of any other art. SF has long been about the human condition, I dare-say since it was ever a 'thing' and before, men have written about what it is to be a man/woman. I would say most things SF presently use it just to fill plot holes - star trek had its “treknobabble”, but it also explored humanity, something modern SF shows seem to barely acknowledge. Heck, even Terminator 2 plucked a few notes in that regard, besides being a brilliant action film. Yeah, come to think of it plenty of 90s SF films had a bit of the old existentialism going on, “Dark City”, “Contact”, “Matrix” (first one, just about) - I have a terrible memory and can't recall any more off the top of my head because I’m getting senile due to old age… I've watched “Arrival”, and the bulk of the film’s juicy stuff came from the book, i.e., a language expressing thoughts/meaning all-at-once, and the relationship with time being a very interesting theme. We're fast approaching the singularity though; population, productivity, consumption, identity; so who knows how we'll handle the future. Man was not born to be idle, and there's a lot of idleness approaching, and idle hands are the devils workshop. These questions, they're age old, really, aren't they. SF with outer space settings is a fraction of that genre. Much SF takes place in the future here on earth. That’s why Tidhar’s novel came as total surprise in this day and age of contemporary SF. This is my first Tidhar, but I suspect that all of his novels may have existentialist themes to them. I'm not exactly sure what the true premise of this book is, except that it's no longer difficult to imagine some of the fiction in SF and that the struggles of book’s characters now seem oddly familiar to me. Every single story in this book’s tapestry has a subtle human angle: The greatest dangers for Jews and Arabs in this novel are not each other, but “strigoi” humans with vampire-like power; at the Central Station, ethnicity, religion, race, technology, and virtual reality rub elbows; descriptions of fantastical aspects of the future seem like references to completely commonplace occurrences...sublime writing. SF with believable characters with complex emotional lives driving the plot. Wow, if only someone had thought of this before of course; there is a lot SF that has unrealistic characters driven by the needs of the plot, but that describes all fiction. The all-over-the-place plot will not be to anyone’s tastes, even to the SF hardcore fan. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Tidhar refers to so many classics in SF, yet he chose a structure for his work that not many of those writers would have considered. It's a work in constant dialogue with the genre but not afraid to go off the beaten path. As such it is not a book for everyone, but if one likes a book that is a bit weird even by SF standards, “Central Station” might be your thing. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

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LibraryThing member iansales

Once upon a time fix-up novels were pretty common in science fiction. Authors would take a bunch of stories, lash them together with a crude framing narrative, and then the whole thing would be presented as a novel. Some were more successful than others… but the fix-up is still an ugly, lumpy and

lop-sided beast of a narrative form. Central Station, although presented as a fix-up novel, and on plenty of novel award shortlists, strikes me more as a collection of linked stories, although there is a story arc which progresses throughout it. I remember one or two of the stories appearing in Interzone and, at the time, I wasn’t especially taken with them. But given the success of this “novel”, and because several people have told me the stories work better together than they did in isolation, I decided to give it a go. And… it still doesn’t really read like a novel. But the individual stories do benefit from being in a collection. Alone, they felt incomplete, unresolved, whereas the novel shows that the resolution is merely cumulative and deferred. The title refers to space port in Tel Aviv/Jaffa, and the stories are focused on a handful of families who live in the environs. There’s no date – it’s the future of a century or two hence – which occasionally leads to weird inconsistences in the setting, a feeling that tropes are deployed when needed rather than being integral, or natural, to the background. The prose, happily, is uniformly good, which means the stories are a pleasure to read. But if each individual story feels slightly unresolved, the novel, as a novel qua novel, manages not to feel that way. I don’t think Central Station is as adventurous, or as challenging, as some commentators have claimed, and it probably says more about the way we now view awards, than it does the book itself, that it’s appeared on so many shortlists – I mean, Osama, A Man Lies Dreaming, those were genuinely challenging sf novels. But, on the other hand, 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…

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LibraryThing member ardvisoor

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 each other,they to communicate,know and understand the other and experience feelings you don't think they posses;
people who don't seem to live peacefully close to each other all are gathered and put in the story plot and somehow you believe it, accept that it is not that impossible.

This books is a difficult but intelligent work.

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LibraryThing member macha

the far future of Earth has revealed no aliens, but plenty of post-humans, many of them of military manufacture. data-vampires and robotniks and sentient old appliances walk the earth while machine intelligences pursue their own interests; genetic and cybernetic options, and religious drugs that

nanochange the body, are individually distributed; adaptoplant cities spring up and fall into disuse; discarded tech piles up on the ground along with live army ordinance; random religions are everywhere, from the Way of Robot to the creator of the Others; and almost everyone is noded from birth and so linked in realtime to the great Conversation. access to the off-world settlements is easy. this is the cyberpunk of the far future, full of imaginative detail, and still asking the great question of sf: what does it mean to be human? the begging of an important series.

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LibraryThing member texascheeseman

Central Station
Author: Lavie Tidhar
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published In: San Francisco, CA
Date: 2016
Pgs: 275

REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
Tel Aviv, the future. 250,000 people live at the base of a space station. Here virtual reality, humanity and all its cultures, the Others, mind

plagues, data vampires, cyborgs, and digital consciousness collide. Central Station stands between humanity and space. One leap. Old world, new world.

Genre:
Aliens
Androids
Cyberpunk
Fiction
Mecha
Philosophy
Pulp
Robots
Science fiction
Space
Vampires

Why this book:
A giant spaceport in the middle of Tel Aviv-Jaffa swirling with the religious, cultural differences magnified a billion times by the entire solar system passing through there.
______________________________________________________________________________

Favorite Character:
Mama Miriam Jones who took the orphaned boy in. Miriam who takes Carmel, the data vampire, in. Miriam who, a long time ago, was a young woman, who loved Boris before he left Earth to put distance between himself and all that is Earth.

Miriam’s brother, Achimwene Haile Selaissie Jones, bookseller and friend to Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man.

Character I Most Identified With:
Lots of characters here. Each of them fronts their own layer to this world’s onion.

I feel Achimwene in my love of books. His descriptions and the descriptions of his shop ring a bell in my head and heart.

The Feel:
There’s a Pinocchio story in here. They are all chasing being human in their individual ways. And finding that humanity in odd ways unique to each individual.

Echoes of Beauty and the Beast show in a subplot here with Motl and Isobel.

And more echoes of Romeo and Juliet in many of the relationships in the book.

Favorite Scene / Quote:
Great world building. Lots of texture and backhanded info dump without being overwhelming. Info dump coming through character action and individual scene setting. Well done.

The description of what Carmel did to Stolichnaya Biru, though whether he intended all along to make his suicide part of his Stillness within a Storm art installation at Polyphemus Port on Titan or if he was pushed further around the bend by Carmel draining his soul, life, data a bit at a time.

Love Motl’s flashback to one of the wars that he was caught up in as a robotnik. Dune’s sandworms in the Sinai. A bioweapon that got loose and started breeding beneath the sands. The Bedouins hunting them for the medicinal qualities of their venom is a nice touch.

Achimwene’s reverence when Ibrahim brings him a box from a time capsule, a box full of ancient books.

The deep Nirvana of the in-book gaming world, the MMORPG on quantum steroids, and the possibility of diving deep into the game architecture dredging through its past and coming to...I’m not going to ruin it, but it made me laugh hard.

Pacing:
No real action through the majority of this book. But the world is so immersive that you can read a chapter that is a noded man sitting with a cyborged robotnik having coffee and talking about old times and the future and it feels like a lot has happened. Tidhar has created a tremendously immersive experience in this book.

Hmm Moments:
Elronites? LOL. Stood in context against the various religions and beliefs from the real world and the ones that are unique to the setting which are all part and parcel of this Tel Aviv-Jaffa-Central Station megacity and the Asimovian and Heinleinian aspects, that’s awesome.

How many cloned messiah came out of the vats? How many different factions are trying to gin up their own unifier?

A genetically certified descendant of King David rode into Jerusalem on a white donkey, amidst portents of an ending, not necessarily The End. Then, someone took him out with a sniper rifle. And, since then the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv-Jaffa-Central Station corridor had been awash with almost messiahs; genejobs, Others beyond the human condition, some points between human and virtual. But messiah projects were everywhere; the Singularity Jesus Project in Laos, the Black Monks of Mars, or the massive virtuality birthing and rebirthing the victims of The Holocaust taking place on the Zion asteroid as it makes its way out system following a beamed dream of what they believed to be a dreaming alien god, 6,000,000 virtual Jewish ghosts taken on an ultimate diaspora.

The Stirgoi / Shambleau data vampires are wicked creatures. Tearing away all that their victims are either all at once or a bite at a time as they slip toward mindlessness / emptiness. The second is what Carmel did to Stolly. The first is what the data vampire on the freighter Emaciated Savior did to Carmel before injecting soul, life, data back into her and making her a Stirgoi in her own right.

Worldbuilding where a cyborg beggar ex-soldier, more machine than man, uses the exclamation “Jesus Elron!” when introduced to a data vampire.

The Burning God was interesting, existing in all the layers of Man, machine, the Conversation, the virtual, the gameverse, and the deep other. Made me think of Burning Man, maybe Burning Man on acid.

WTF Moments:
The Others bodysurfing the humans sounds horrible from the human perspective. The humans being involved out-of-body or asleep and awakening to find something different about their body when they awake.
______________________________________________________________________________

Last Page Sound:
That was cool.

Author Assessment:
Will definitely look at other stuff by Lavie Tidhar.

Knee Jerk Reaction:
instant classic

Disposition of Book:
Irving Public Library
South Campus
Irving, TX

Dewey Decimal System:
F
TID

Would recommend to:
everyone
______________________________________________________________________________

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LibraryThing member nancyadair

Central Station imagines a world where divisions have blurred between man-created and biological entities and corporate and personal memory. Conversation has shifted from personal one-on-one dialogue to universal eavesdropping and vicarious experience available through an implanted node.

Central

Station is the interstellar port that rises above Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa where people "still lived as they had always lived." We will recognize aspects of their lives, the human need for love, the seeking of answers through faith and escape through drugs, the vilification of those who are different. And yet this world, this society, is totally a new imagining.

Originally a series of short stories about individuals whose ancestors came to build the station or fight in the old wars, this is not a plot-driven book but is still compulsive. Long explanations do not burden the tale; you take the strange and new by faith and context, growing into understanding.

Some of the characters and their stories include:

Boris Chong and Miriam Jones had once been young and in love. Boris worked in the labs that created human life but left to work on Mars. He has returned to Central Station with a Martian aug, a parasite, having learned his father's memory was failing. Miriam has adopted a strange child born in Boris's lab.

Boris is followed by an ex-lover named Carmel, a data vampire who is shunned and dangerous. Carmel becomes lovers with one of the few humans without a node, Achimwene, a man she cannot feed on and who cannot become addicted to the dopamine high stimulated by her theft of their memory data. Sometimes he wonders what it was like to be "whole," growing up part of the Conversation, for a human without a node was a 'cripple'. His passion is for mid-twentieth century pulp fiction books, the cheap paperbacks crumbling and yellowed. Their story and search for answers was one of my favorite sections.

"Just another broken-down robotnik, just another beggar hunting the night streets looking for a handout or a fix or both."

Miriam's sister Isobel Chow is in love with Motl, an ex-soldier who was mechanically rebuilt over and over until he is more machine than man. Robots haven't been made for a long time and these veterans end up on the street begging for replacement parts to keep going. He no longer recalls what wars he had fought, but the vision of war and death remain. He is an ex-addict of the faith drug Crucifixion. Now his parts are breaking down, but his feelings are strong. "Sometimes you needed to believe you could believe, sometimes you had to figure heaven could come from another human being and not just in a pill."

"This part of the world had always needed a messiah."

R. Brother Patch-It is a robo-priest and part-time moyel. "We dream a consensus of reality," he preaches. It feels tired, old, his parts wearing out, and sometimes he is envious of the human trait of sensation and stimulation. "To be a robot, you needed faith, R. Patch-It thought. To be a human, too."

On the flip side, Ruth Cohen longs to be part of something bigger, a total immersion in The Conversation, the linked awareness made possible through the node implant. "Are you willing to give up your humanity?" she is asked.

Behind these otherworldly characters are still basic stories of humanity's essence: the search for love and meaning.

"It is, perhaps, the prerogative of every man or woman to imagine, and thus force a shape, a meaning, onto that wild and meandering narrative of their lives by choosing genre. A princess is rescued by a prince; a vampire stalks a victim in the dark; a student becomes the master. The circle is complete. And so on."

"There comes a time in a man's life when he realizes stories are lies. Things do not end neatly."

My son, blog writer of Battered, Tattered, Yellowed and Creased, raved about Tidhar's book (read his review here) which motivated me to request it through NetGalley. Central Station has won multiple awards and huge recognition. It is sure to be a classic. I thank the publisher for the ebook in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

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LibraryThing member davisfamily

Just didn’t enjoy this. I struggled to make sense of the story line.

LibraryThing member Gena678

Just when the author started to pull me in with an intriguing storyline, they started another story from another POV and it shook me out of the book again. I loved different parts of this, but felt like it didn't gel together, or resolve anything. More like a short story collection.

LibraryThing member burritapal

The characters were not convincing, imo. The best part was in the end, at the euthanasia park, where Vlad Chong goes on the death coaster. When I get cancer, that's how I'd like to go.
It seems this was made from the short story"Vladimir Chong wants to die."

LibraryThing member nmele

Perhaps the most conventional of Lavie Tidhar’s novels I have read so far, Central Station is a set of interlocking stories about love and community. In relatively few pages, Tidhar portrays a fascinating, complex future for humankind. His universe is expansive but not shallow.

Fewer