Lavie Tidhar is a fast-rising superstar. His novel Osama won the World Fantasy Award in 2012, and his “Guns & Sorcery” novella Gorel & The Pot Bellied God won the British Fantasy Award. The Violent Century, his most recent novel, was called “A masterpiece” by both the Independent and Library Journal, and his second short story collection Black Gods Kiss was nominated for the British Fantasy Award.

His latest is Central Station, a fix-up novel composed of nearly a dozen stories published in places like Analog, Interzone, and Clarkesworld, plus two new tales. NPR Books calls it “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.” Tor.com said it is “without question the best assemblage of short stories I’ve read in recent memory,” and Starburst Magazine gives it 10 out of 10 stars, calling it “profound, incredibly moving and, quite simply, stunning.”

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Here’s the 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’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.

Our previous coverage of Lavie Tidhar includes:

Black Gods Kiss
The Violent Century
The Bookman Histories

Central Station was published by Tachyon Publications on May 10, 2016. It is 252 pages, priced at $15.99 for the trade paperback, and $9.99 digital version. The gorgeous cover is by Sarah Anne Langton.

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