Central Station Review

Life's been insane lately, so I've fallen behind on the blog.  I apologize. 

This week's novel is Central Station by Lavie Tidhar.

Central Station has its base in Tel Aviv and lifts to a suborbital platform for people to come and go from Earth.  At the base of Central Station cultures collide, from Jewish people and Muslims, to the descendants of the workers brought in to build the station, to people passing through, to the mysterious Others.

The universe created here is thick.  There's so much going on.  There's the world you can see, then a layer of internet that everyone can access through the nodes put into their brains at birth, and then a layer of virtual reality.  The solar system has been colonized (a trope I love) and there are different cultures on different planets and asteroids and moons.  But this book takes it to a new level by having each colony or city started by a certain national or ethnic group, and then the cities act as diasporas.  There's a city on Mars called Tong Yun which is Chinese, but they're Tong Yun Chinese, separate from Earth Chinese, and separate from the Tong Yun Chinese from virtual reality.  There are cyborgs, there are different cyborgs, there are robots, there are sentient appliances, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness onto the internet as sentient code, there are people who've uploaded their consciousness into appliances, there are AIs that evolved on their own, there are AIs that co-habit a body with a human and give them super powers, then there are different people who also have super powers.  There are prehistoric aliens from Mars, regrown and attached to human hosts, there are aliens in virtual reality, there are people who've surgically added arms and dyed themselves red to look like the aliens on virtual Mars.  There are vampires who suck the data out of your node. 
There is a lot happening in this book.

The sense of wonder about all these many many things drives the story rather than a plot.  The book is a series of stories, each from a different point of view from a character in a completely different situation.  That way, we see a lot of the universe that has been created, but if there's a mystery about why or how or what will happen to any of the characters, those won't be answered because that's not the point.  The point is to marvel at the future.   This didn't work for me so much because there were questions I had and there were people I cared about, but they were dropped after their chapter.  I think if they were dropped completely and we never saw them again, if this was a collection of short stories all set in the same universe, it would have worked better for me.  But the characters I cared about kept popping back up in the periphery of other stories, rubbing it in that I wasn't going to get any answers.

There were a lot of cool ideas here, and I wanted a deep dive into any of them.  Instead, I was shown cool ideas, and that's how it goes sometimes.