A Son of the Rock

Tachyon, 2016, 277 p.

Central Station is a giant spaceport situated between Arab Jaffa and Jewish Tel Aviv. The incidents of the book occur under its shadow but the station itself is curiously absent from the narrative, we do not see inside it as such, it is merely a backdrop.

The book is filled with a multitude of Science-Fictional concepts, a kind of mind-vampire known as strigoi; robots yearning to be human; characters with augmentation; a third essential component of a human along with sperm and egg, the node seed, enabling people always to be in connection; a family, the Chongs, with memories passed on from generation to generation. The text is also sprinkled with references to previous works or authors of SF. There is an Elronite Centre for the Advancement of Humankind, mentions of Louis Wu, Jubjub birds, sandworms, the Up and Out, Mother Hitton, Shambleau, Glimmung, all of which will be decoded easily by aficionados. And the cover is not without its button-pushing charms.

The setting is a welcome antidote to the mainly US-centred concerns of the genre up to recent times and Tidhar deserves appreciation for championing SF from outwith the usual sources.

However, there is something disjointed about the book as a whole, no ongoing narrative drive, as there is little by way of plot. This is perhaps due to the book’s prior incarnation as a set of stories sharing the same milieu (and characters,) published in different outlets between 2011 and 2013 – with two original to these pages. This is not an objection that could be levelled at the same author’s Bookman Histories nor the other novels of his I have read, Osama and A Man Lies Dreaming, but it is a hindrance to full engagement with the text. There is, perhaps, just too much going on, not enough exploration or development of the individual ideas to give a completely satisfying whole.

He is an author to look for though.

Pedant’s corner:- On the map at the beginning; chryogenic (cryogenic.) Otherwise; Mama Jones’ (Mama Jones’s,) a missing full stop at the end of a piece of direct speech, automatons (strictly, automata,) Venusian Fly Trap (this being SF it might be Venusian but the earth-bound version is a Venus fly trap.) “She had hid” (she had hidden, plus a later instance of “had hid”,) sunk (sank,) a greengrocers’ (a greengrocer’s,) moyel (I’ve only seen this before as moyle,) “could convert food and drink into energy” (um; no. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; only transformed from one kind into another. Food and drink already contain [chemical] energy, bodies convert that to heat, movement, electricity etc as required,) lacrimal apparatus (lachrymal,) “a simulacra” (one of these is a simulacrum, several instances,) a full stop where a question mark was required, “reversed engineered” (reverse engineered,) mazal tov (several instances yet later is in the more familiar form “mazel tov”.)