A Son of the Rock

Tachyon Press, 2022, 240 p, including 2 p Map, 5 p Afterword and 26 p Beyond Neom, an A to Z. Reviewed for ParSec 5.

Another downloading from Tidhar’s fertile imagination. Science Fictional ideas and references spin off this in giddy profusion. If you want your fix of the strange and wonderful, even the downright odd, get it right here. Set in the same future as the author’s Central Station (2016,) in which humanity and its adjuncts have sprawled across the Solar System, it takes its title from a city set by the Red Sea, a city which at the moment is only the dream of a Saudi prince but in this book, as Tidhar informs us in a short foreword, is old. There is also a prefatory map of the area which is not strictly necessary for understanding or enjoyment but adds to the effect. (Tidhar seems fond of such maps, they are also found in Central Station and Unholy Land.)

This imagined Neom “was built on the premise that anything can be fixed, made good, made better,” and is policed by the shurta. Not that it needs much policing. As one character’s viewpoint has it, “the only real crime in Neom was being poor. And only the poor joined the shurta.” Wars have come and gone. In the desert beyond the city lurk UXOs, Unexploded Ordnance, aka smart bombs. In the recent past Terrorartists, mass murderers, used pain and death as their paint, people as their brushes, “the experience itself became their canvas.” Such art requires witnesses. After all, “If a bomb went off in a crowded market and there was no one to broadcast and amplify the experience, did it really go off?”

In this world people are noded at birth to be part of the communication system known as the Conversation, “that virtuality of worlds that is all around, as persistent as air.” We follow various characters – human, robot and jackal – as they make their way in and around or towards the city. For herself to survive and to pay for her mother’s care Mariam took any job she could (“Neom was a city for the rich and the rich needed the poor in order to be rich,”) and we see her in several of them, firstly when she gives a flower to the robot, who subsequently keeps bumping into her at her various employments. The boy, Saleh, goes with the Green Caravanserai carrying an artefact he has salvaged from a terrorartist event wherein his family died and which he hopes to sell. The jackal, Anubis, teams up with him in El Quesir. Shurta member Nasir is attracted to Mariam but the time somehow isn’t right. On a patrol one night in the desert he and his companions Laila and Habib come across the robot digging a hole. Its activities attract the dangerous attention of UXOs, drawn in by emanations from the golden limbs it is excavating.

All come together at Mukhtar’s Bazaar of Rare and Exotic Machines where the golden parts are to be reassembled into a golden man, with Saleh contributing its missing piece, the black hole at its heart, a beacon for robotkind, the last work of terrorartist Nasu.

As a writer Tidhar is frequently playful, allusive and self-referential. Grace notes await the attentive reader. There are sly quotations of the Laws of Robotics (here regarded as being only ever a philosophical concept,) a small black monolith in a corner gives someone a headache when they look at it, mentions of the Up and Out, his own Lior Tirosh is included in a list of admired poets. The robot points out the meaning of Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech in the question, “If you wrong us shall we not revenge?” saying Shylock understood violence. There is acute observation too. “Religions propagated much like viruses. They evolved, spread, died.” His characters are sketched economically but believably.

A harsh critic would complain it all ends too soon and we don’t really see much of Neom the city, but, as Tidhar’s Afterword (in which he explicitly bows to Cordwainer Smith) says, he’s always loved future histories, so there could be more to come from this source. There is, though, a 26-page A to Z of the Central Station universe to bulk things out.

Tidhar has of late become fairly prolific. Perhaps he’s made good use of lockdown. Neom shows there has been no drop-off in quality.

Pedant’s corner:- Elias’ (x 3, Elias’s,) “Nasir feared the hole will close up on them” (feared the hole would close up,) “none were ever turned away” (x 2, none was ever turned away.) “It had voice like old sand grinding” (It had a voice like,) “Mukhtar genuinely troubled”  (Mukhtar was genuinely troubled,) distill (distil.) “‘I wish you didn’t come’” (hadn’t come,) a full stop instead of a question mark at the end of a question (x 2.) “‘The trick is finding someone who would listen’” (who will listen.) “‘One of the Monks lay in the carrot patch. Their head was bashed in’” (Its head,) “‘an when I got to’” (and when I got to,) “how they’d went out to dinner together” (how they’d gone out,) “it existed in a state of relative piece” (relative peace,) no one (no-one,) “and the figure in on the pedestal” (no ‘in’ needed.) “He shined his torch around” (He shone his torch.) “‘It’s only <em>miniature</em> black hole’” (only a <em>miniature</em> black hole’,) “the nanite algae that grows” (algae that grow,) “sank in nano-goo” (sunk,) virii (viruses?) “fell into quicksand, fell into pits” (fallen into quicksand, fallen into pits,) “she put the air condition on” (the air conditioning.) In the A to Z; “often and affectionately to Polyport” (often and affectionately shortened to/known as Polyport,) “though stories told in the Outer System” (though stories are told in,) “often moving from world to another” (from one world to another,) “where there presence” (their presence,) synthetising (synthesising,) utlising (utilising.)