Central Station

WINNER the 2017 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

WINNER 2018 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards in Speculative Fiction

WINNER 2021 Chinese Nebula (Xingyun) Award for Best Translated Fiction

Nominated for the 2017 Locus Award

Nominated for the 2017 Arthur C. Clarke Award

Nominated for the 2019 Kurd Laßwitz Award

Nominated for the 2019 Premio Italia

Nominated for the 2019 Premio Kelvin 505

Nominated for the 2018 Nowej Fantastyki Awards

Nominated for the 2018 Geffen Award

The Guardian’s Best SF & Fantasy Novels of 2016 Selection

NPR’s Best Books of 2016 Selection

Barnes & Noble’s Best SF & Fantasy Novels of 2016 Selection

Book Depository Best Books of 2016 Selection

Tor.com’s Best Books of 2016 Selection

Locus Recommended Reading List 2016

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.

WHAT THEY SAY

“If you want to know what SF is going to look like in the next decade, this is it.” – Gardner Dozois, editor of the best-selling Year’s Best Science Fiction series

“A dazzling tale of complicated politics and even more complicated souls. Beautiful.” – Ken Liu, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy winner and author of The Grace of Kings

“If Nalo Hopkinson and William Gibson held a seance to channel the spirit of Ray Bradbury, they might be inspired to produce a work as grimy, as gorgeous, and as downright sensual as Central Station.” – Peter Watts, Shirley Jackson, Tähtivaeltaja, and Seiun award-winning author of Blindsight and Echopraxia

“Lavie Tidhar weaves the threads of classic and modern science fiction tropes with the skills of a gene surgeon and creates a whole new landscape to portray a future both familiar and unsettling. A unique marriage of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, C. L. Moore, China Miéville, and Larry Niven with 50 degrees of compassion and the bizarre added. An irresistible cocktail.” – Maxim Jakubowski, author of the Sunday Times bestselling Vina Jackson novels

“Central Station is masterful: simultaneously spare and sweeping—a perfect combination of emotional sophistication and speculative vision. Tidhar always stuns me.” – Kij Johnson, author of At the Mouth of the River of Bees

“Tidhar weaves strands of faith and science fiction into a breathtaking and lush family history of the far future.” – Max Gladstone, author of Three Parts Dead

“Like all good science fiction, the linked stories of Central Station are really about the here and now we live in. Most urgently, they are about just who ‘we’ might be, here on this overcrowded, contested, Anthropocene world that we all must share. Lavie Tidhar writes in generous detail and expansive vision of a New, and old Jerusalem, and of the many possible ‘we’s’ who live there.” – Carter Scholz, author of Radiance

“Central Station boasts complexity without complication, sharp prose, and a multi-dimensional world.” – Jeffrey Ford, author of The Girl in the Glass

“Disturbingly strange, yet bizarrely familiar, like implanted memories from a future you have not yet lived. I loved it.” —Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies and Others

“A mosaic of mind-blowing ideas and a dazzling look at a richly-imagined, textured future.”—Aliette de Bodard, author of The House of Shattered Wings

“Beautiful, original, a shimmering tapestry of connections and images – I can’t think
of another SF novel quite like it. Lavie Tidhar is one of the most distinctive voices
to enter the field in many years.”—Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series

“I recommend it highly. It’ll stay with you for days, because every idea in it has more ideas under it. It’s all of science fiction distilled into a single book.” – Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan

“Central Station is full of the worries and aspirations of a new generation of science fiction people. This is not a simple science fiction novel, but a projection of a multi-ethnic coexistence world, a true fable for the present and the future. ” – Wu Yan

“Roles and characters are evidenced, stories are linked to stories, and through a community perspective that connects to each other, we are like a shuttle in the central station of Tel Aviv to get a glimpse of a glorious, chaotic future. It is the perfect combination of literature and imagination.” – Hao Jingfang

“Lavie Tidhar used Central Station to reshape a wild, dreamy and homesick future of Tel Aviv, and also reshaped our understanding and expectation of science fiction.” – Chen Qiufan

REVIEWS

“Magnificently blends literary and speculative elements in this streetwise mosaic novel… 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)

“A fascinating future glimpsed through the lens of a tight-knit community. Tidhar changes genres with every outing, but his astounding talents guarantee something new and compelling no matter the story he tells.” – Library Journal (starred review)

“Brilliant… beautiful… alight with wonder and […] perfectly realized… It is just this side of a masterpiece.” – NPR

“include[s] some of Tidhar’s most beautiful prose, and his future Tel Aviv is is among the most evocative settings in recent SF … Somehow, Central Station combines a cultural sensitivity too long invisible in SF with a sensibility that is nothing but classic SF, and the result is rather elegant suite of tales.” – Locus

“[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… Despite the book’s affectionate allusions to earlier science-fiction themes, its deeply humane world seems both thoroughly new and oddly familiar.” – The Chicago Tribune

“Tidhar’s last two books, The Violent Century and A Man Lies Dreaming, were rightly given great acclaim, so were always going to be tough acts to follow. Central Station maintains that standard, cementing Lavie Tidhar as one of science fiction’s great voices, an author who creates scenarios and characters that feel destined to become classics, ones that readers will be happy to revisit time and time again. It’s a compelling collection that mixes the epic and the intimate, one that succeeds at being profound, incredibly moving and, quite simply, stunning.” – Starburst Magazine

“Sublimely sensual, emotionally moreish, and composed with crystalline clarity” – Tor.com

“Powerfully imagined and beautifully rendered… capture[s] profound emotional truths” – Interzone

“Quietly enthralling and subtly ingenious… this quietly extravagant tale charts small-scale but impactful affairs of the hearts, minds and souls of its cast with tender empathy.” – Paul di Filippo, Asimov’s

“Groundbreaking… radically unique… genius literary invention.” – Norman Spinrad, Asimov’s

“a standout, absorbing, well realised sci-fi world, with characters who feel like they’re about to stroll off the page and take you for a cup of arak.” – Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews

“If you’re looking for something a little more philosophical and thoughtful than the usual fare in the genre, look no further than this book . . . a fantastic read.” – Strange Currencies

“Lavie Tidhar gives enormous depth to the world he creates. . . . Central Station is a fascinating glimpse into a very possible future.” – Metapunk

“one of the most breathtakingly, bewilderingly, mindbendingly imaginative stories I’ve read” – Bookaneer

BUY

Amazon

Amazon UK

LIMITED EDITION

Limited to 100 signed hardcover copies in slipcase. Contains bonus story “Crabapple”. Published by PS Publishing, 2016.

cssignedcover