Central Station - Lavie Tidhar

The chapters in Central Station were originally published as short stories, but Tidhar has reworked them into a connected narrative of sorts. Taking place some time in the future, around an elevator that is the departure point to space in what was Tel Aviv, Central Station, well, I'm not exactly sure what it's supposed to be about. There are a lot of threads, and sometimes they intertwine, and sometimes they don't. And because of that, there isn't a climax to the story. Different characters get moments where they make some decision about their lives, but then the story continues beyond that.

Which is part of the point, that lives don't fit the neat, narrative arcs we'd like to assign them, the ones they often get in fiction. One of the characters is a dealer of actual, print books, and he reflects on that more than once, that he keeps trying to fit his relationship with a cyber-vampire, for lack of a better description, into some simple path, and that isn't how things work.

There's also a sense, that even though this is in the future, even though the world looks very different from ours in some respects, that people are still pretty much the same. They still seek some higher force at work (possibly related to the desire for a simple narrative arc; once your perspective is far enough out, all the twists and turns are indistinguishable). The things we create have consequences we couldn't imagine at the time, and we often don't want to deal with what's left over. People still fear death, still fear being forgotten, still want to get away from where they started. The options available may be different; you can run to Mars, or Titan, or even further, or create a digital consciousness that operates at a level most humans can't perceive, but would like to. But it's all the same old desires driving it.

I don't know if that sounds like an endorsement of the book or not, because I'm not sure whether I'd encourage someone to read it or not. It's probably too down-to-Earth for me; I like science fiction for the strange places authors create, and Tidhar has some of that. But the ones that sounded most interesting to me - the Jettisoned, the Dragon and its nest of "spiders" tunneling around in one of Pluto's moons - are barely mentioned. The story is very much grounded in the everyday lives of these people on Earth, going about their jobs and relationships, dealing with not understanding their kids, stuff like that.

"Surely there are more directions than up or down," Achimwene said without thinking. He immediately regretted it. They passed Level Three without stopping. Come on, he thought. Get this over with!

"Not for an elevator," the elevator said complacently. "But I do not intend to always be an elevator, you know."