Do you remember those old Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns in which Clint travelled the American West's High Plains as the man-with-no-name, pursuing mysterious goals and keeping close counsel? Well, that's this book, except this book is way cooler. Instead of a grizzled mysterious gunslinger, we have a mysterious grizzled decommissioned robot assassin, also with no name. Instead of the American West we have the Middle East. Instead of the "olde" west, we have the near future. This is Tidhar's "Central Station" territory, a place of delicate peace built on a foundational history of brutal war. Aliens, mechs, and robots from throughout the solar system end up here, or wash up here, and everyone's looking or scheming for something. Tidhar's future tech and the society it's based on is well-conceived and makes sense, and the world he has created is logical and plausible. That said, there is a surprise and a marvel around almost every corner, and a sense of wonder envelopes the whole enterprise. The center of everything, though, is the "robot-with-no-name", whose stoic and knowing deadpan, and sneaky sense of humor, drives the narrative, aided and enhanced by a vast canvas of compelling and well wrought secondary characters. This book is a delight and a rewarding and thoughtful entertainment; I enjoyed it unreservedly.

I'm familiar with Lavie Tidhar from the much more violent By Force Alone. Neom was a gentle breath of sweet sugar, an atmospheric read that somehow game a very soft mood. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of the book.

Stars: 3 out of 5

I'm not sure how I feel about this book. The prose is beautiful, and some of the themes are sufficiently nostalgic to be interesting. It also feels heartfelt. In a way, it reminds me of a mosaic. Each individual piece is like a gem, beautiful and shiny on its own. But when you try to put all those gems together to form a picture, you realize that they don't quite fit, that the author was more interested in those individual gems than in telling a coherent story.

There are too many points of view, and even though some of those characters are interesting in their own right, we don't spend enough time with them to really get to know them. We just hop to another shiny gem, then another. Which makes these encounters only surface deep. We simply don't get to know these characters well enough to care what happens to them, not that any of them ever were in serious danger to start with.

And that's my second complaint about this story - there are no stakes, there is no tension, there is no danger. At no point in the narration did I have the impression that the characters were dealing with a life and death situation, or something life-altering, or heck, even important. We have all these weapons, and robots, and echoes from past wars all over the place, but the story lacks teeth. Even the climax of the story, when the golden man is awake and all those weapons are headed for the city, is written in such a way that there is no tension to it... Probably because you can't really care for characters you aren't invested in.

Seriously, what was the point of this book? To proselytize about the human condition and what makes us an individual versus a machine? Other books have done this better and kept the tension going. To reflect on the consequences of war and the emotional toll it has on all participants? Again, there are better books about that as well. I would suggest reading Look to Windward by Ian Banks, for example. 

The worldbuilding is interesting, with hints and past wars and events that I would have loved to explore more. Humanity has pretty much colonized the whole solar system, as well as the deep oceans on Earth... yet the desert and the city of Neom feels very 21st century Dubai. Are you telling me that hundreds of years into the future, when we terraformed Mars and the Moon, we still haven't figured out how to restore our own ecosystem? 

Another issue is that the characters don't seem to "live in" the advanced word that is described to us. It's more like they have been dropped into it without being fully integrated. They act and behave like people from our century, instead of humans who have augments and implants and all the advanced technologies. In fact, there is very little of those technologies shown in day to day life.

So this leaves me with a conundrum - I enjoyed the writing, but the story is utterly forgettable. In fact, I can't even name any of the characters now that I've finished it. 

PS: I received an advanced copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My review is scheduled to appear in July/August 2023 Reference Librarian column in Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Neom by Lavie Tidhar was not quite what I had expected but certainly has an interesting premise. This quick read takes place in a possible future, primarily focused in the Middle East, with centuries of robot evolution and colonies on other planets and moons. Continue reading to see my thoughts on this new book by Lavie Tidhar.

Plot
I think I liked the premise much more than the plot itself. That being said I think the issue was there was not much of a plot. By the end of Neom, I was not really sure what had entirely happened. There was not a huge about of character growth or the like. I still can’t tell if we can say there was a conflict in the book. At one point I was like “oh here comes the major conflict of the novel,” but then the plot just took the nearest exit ramp that avoided it. Thus it did not feel like there was much on the line for any of the characters that would have the reader worry about consequences.

World-building
I think Tidhar’s world-building really carried Neom. I loved how they envisioned the future and brought it to life for the readers. They created a world beyond Earth in a future where humans have settled throughout the solar system on various planets and moons. It would have been interesting to see what happened on those planets, but the story firmly took place on Earth. While some characters mention things on other plants, such as Martian soap operas or their pasts traveling to other places, the reader did not get to experience those places.

I did also enjoy seeing a glimpse into the robots in this book. Neom is set where several hundreds of years of robot culture were built and eventually evolved over time. There were some points of view through the robots, which certainly helped to build an understanding of some of the sentience of robots.

Overall
I really enjoy the world that was created in this speculative fiction, but the plot really fell flat for me. I wanted there to be more on the line and to be really invested in what was going to happen. But in the end, the plot of Neom did not live up to the expectations of the premise. I would still recommend the book on the basis of the world that Tidhar created.

This novella is wonderful! I loved how the different threads interwove, pulled together and created a lovely tapestry of this future of our Earth. I can’t hardly wait to read Central Station now. I adore robots and androids and such and these were really interesting ones with vast histories. The story is not at all straightforward but that’s what I really like about it. At no point did I have any idea where things were leading me, how they would progress or end. And yet, nothing was random.

I will definitely be reading more of Lavie Tidhar. I read and listened because I wanted to make more progress but I think eye reading was the better medium. The narrator did a fine job, but she made some odd (unexpected?) pronunciation choices, especially with names. I found I did not understand well enough when listening.

The setting is the far future of the city of Neom and surrounding desert of the middle east. This novel has a unique feel, both allegorical and cyberpunk at the same time. The city of Neom is created in glowing detail - the technologically-afforded luxuries of the residents, juxtaposed with the grittier lives of the people serving them. This is a time beyond simple, human-controlled robots and is partially an inquiry into where AI and robotics may progress.

I was initially intrigued by the obvious references to the Saudi-imagined city Neom that is currently under construction. But there are so many issues touched upon in this novel, my head was spinning with them even as I was mesmerized by the futuristic sci fi.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and the various storylines, characters and detailed future-building captured my imagination.

Lavie Tidhar - Neom
 
Neom is a tech wonderland for the rich and beautiful, an urban sprawl along the Red Sea; and a port of call between Earth and the stars. 
Now, that of course is the mammoth metropolitan area in the story, which on the one hand is set quite a bit into the future, but on the other hand in a recognisable extension of our world. In our world, our time, Neom is an airport, some building sites, and a dream in a Sheikh’s head, displayed to the world in a website and a number of promo videos. But what a dream it is!

This is Lavie Tidhar’s second novel set in his ever expanding ‘Central Station’ universe (the post-script sets out a number of short stories which also loosely connect). He is a British Science Fiction, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Award winner, his work spans literature, SF, Fantasy, Graphic Novels as well as editing the Best of World SF anthologies. 

In contrast to Central Station, the earlier novel that this is based on, Neom is much less of a Patchwork Novel. The story segments are still playing off each other, are trading topics and threads like a well-versed chamber orchestra. But the hand-overs are much smoother and much more hidden in the flow and telling of the story, though. 
The unfolding story is told through the eyes and actions of 3 main protagonists (and a few lesser ones): Mariam is a flower seller, cleaner, shop assistant, and volunteer at a Sims Shelter for abandoned virtual life forms, whose salaries mainly go towards the care home for her mother. 
Saleh is a young orphan who has just lost the rest of his family/tribe during an excavation for relicts from a Robotnik nest from the 2nd or 3rd war, which is also the scene of a terrorartist attack resulting in a suspended, still-ongoing explosion of a time dilation bomb (very strong reference, for me, to China Miéville’s ‘Three Moments of an Explosion’). 
And the third one is a Robot, humanoid, unnamed, who fought in the wars on Earth, who fought on Mars and beyond, who used to serve humans, and who has now returned to follow some memories, and - no, that would be telling. Let’s just say he buys a rose from Mariam, lays it at the site of a spaceship crash in the desert, and then proceeds to dig up the remains of a golden robot.

There’s more, so much more here. The robot talks about ‘our cousins in the digitality’, humans talk about the Others, there’s loads of discussions and reference to philosophy, the laws of robotics, sentience, the religion of the robots. And about love.
The book provides an Appendix called ‘Beyond Neom: An A to Z’ which lists and briefly explains most of the concepts and references from the novel as well from the associated short stories.

On the one hand this feels light, like a feather, only barely touching the surface. And on the other hand it deals with heavy questions of life, love, death, and those who make an art of the latter. Sometimes the story and the world it shows feels like it’s all history and not future, like it’s all broken. Dreaming other people’s dreams. 
Besides the Miéville mentioned above I picked up other references this made for me - the initial look at Neom through Mariam’s eyes, where we see the underbelly of the workers living on the fringes of the ever-young & happening city brought back memories of John Courtenay-Grimwood’s Arabesk trilogy, whilst some of the history from the back-story below/beyond the bright lights of the city have more than a whiff of Harlan Ellison’s ‘The Wine Has Been Left Open Too Long and the Memory Has Gone Flat’.

But judge for yourself - this is as grand as it is short, and I’m sure your references will be different.

More Lavie Tidhar

Thanks to the publisher for the review copy. 

Title: Neom
Series: Central Station
Series Number: 2
Author: Lavie Tidhar
Reviewer: Markus
Reviewer URL: http://thierstein.net
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Publisher URL: http://www.tachyonpublications.com
Publication Date: Nov 2022
Review Date: 221230
ISBN:9781616963835
Price: USD 9.99
Pages: 156
Format: ePub
Topic: Mid East
Topic: Robot SF

Neom is a book about losing and finding, hope and despair.
I read the book actually only because I heard it had won the prize for best sci-fi in 2022. Had I seen it lying in the bookstore, I hadn't touched it. But I am glad I stepped out of my comfort zone.
The book is about people finding a purpose in life, or rather, finding something that fills up their life to let it become more than sheer existing. The style in which the novel is written is rather easy to understand, which I like as I am not an english-speaking native. Furthermore, I often hear the question for a novel which isn't too complexly written but with a beautiful message. Now I can recommend this.
The story takes place in Neom, a place built in the hopes of a better and more peaceful and understanding future. Everyone can find their place there, it being a place of acceptance. But that is only on the surface, what tourists see. Many things go wrong in Neom, people seek to find purpose and fulfillment in their lives.
The novel is written episodically, which means we accompany a person a chapter and get to know them, there is no real timeline.
The only minus I have is that the unique storytelling mechanism is also the weakness of the book. Despite it's shortness I sometimes struggled to keep my interest, missing sometimes a little bit more of tension and grip to keep me interested. But all in all a beautiful novel with a lovely message: Seek and you may find.
This book is meant for people that struggle with long books and stories. A book for people maybe preferring short stories. People liking the movie Dune but scared off by the sheer size of the work, but still wanting to read something with essence. This is for you

“That’s Neom,” Elias said, and the sudden name filled Saleh with a longing he could not articulate.

Let me start off by saying that I'm not a huge fan of sci-fi, but this book was under 300 pages and the clear reference to the city being built by the Saudi's was enough to pull me in; Neom, a city where the crime is to litter, be poor, or ugly.

In that sense this book is incredibly creative. For the most part I wasn't sure which direction the book would go in. The thing with the robot happens in a subtle way; you think he's a robot who has maybe skewed some of his programming. But even that, which is a bit slow, is interesting. In this glittering city where Mariam still lives working her enumerable jobs, where the policeman feel useless and this sentient robot, already part of the past, seems to be doing something for love.

“Are we really sentient, though?” the robot said. “Or are we only very good at pretending?”

It's also a great book for people who liked Dune or epic fantasy reads like GoT or LOTR. There is a lot of information to process and if I had to process any more I would have given up on the book, even if some things like the virtually bred creatures were a delightful addition to the story. But reading this also reminded me of Walter Benjamin's commentary on the print Angelus Novus by Paul Klee and how much so much is destroyed for the sake of progress; and all that cannot be undone.

The Fondly was my favourite though.

Fresh from the triumph of his Ellroyesque crime saga Maror (see my review), ”Neom” is the second book in a loose series called Central Station, set in a distant future in the shifting sands of the Middle East. A lush dreamscape written in Lavie Tidhar's wonderful prose, the novel brings together a flower seller, a police officer, a laconic, creaky robot, a returning art-terrorist, an orphan gleaning boy, and quite possibly, a legendary golden man. With beautiful precision, the author gathers up the pieces, towards an event bringing the assemblage in futuristic city Neom of ancient warrior machines. Neom is a brilliant feat of imagination and writing that grips from the first page. I commend it to you.

Neom is an odd book for me to read - it's a book set in the same world as Tidhar's acclaimed novel "Central Station", which featured humans, robots, cyber-beings, and other entities in a future Tel Aviv/near Tel Aviv city called Central Station, which connected Earth to various outposts in the stars. Tidhar's work has often interested me, especially his shorter fiction (and he has edited some really good anthologies of world science fiction), and yet I didn't particularly love Central Station, which was written essentially as a series of stories in the same setting and then combined through editing into a single novel....and I didn't find the combination really did anything for me. So there as a good chance that Neom, an explicit return to the Central Station world, although in Saudi Arabia (currently in real life the dream city of Saudi autocrats) rather than Central Station, would not work for me either.

But to my pleasant surprise, Neom works really well, despite sharing a lot of similarities with Central Station: once again this is a story with no overarching conflict, no real antagonist, and no major plot momentum or tension that relies instead on characters' stories and interactions coming together to showcase character development in very very different peoples. In Neom, this is mainly an old Robot, a veteran of wars on Earth and in Space who is trying to resurrect a lost part of his past that he mourns tragically for, a middle aged woman working multiple jobs in a class-stratified city of Neom, and a boy whose family was lost trying to scavenge in the deadly remains of a terror artist who is trying to escape the world which holds only tragedy for him and to find a way into space. The characters here are really well done, the vignettes are strong, and the stories of people trying to survive, to love, to find their ways past their pasts and into new futures come together really nicely - and the story is highly entertaining at times too in how it's told. All in all, I really liked Neom, despite it not really fitting into my normal reading.

Note: I read half of this in audiobook and the reader is very very good. Recommended as a book in that format, and it's only 5.5 hours at normal speed there to boot.



-----------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
In the future, Neom is the megacity promised by the rich of today....at least for the super rich. But for the lower class people, people like Mariam, it's simply a place they can struggle to survive by working multiple jobs, taking pleasures in conversations with simplistic outdated AI machines, and trying to do the best for oneself and ones loved ones. It's a place where the police-like Shurta are essentially pointless, only enforcing minor laws since there is no crime, and vandalism of old machines is of little interest to anyone...even if those machines are cared for by people like Mariam.

But Neom is about to face an upheaval. For out in the Desert, a boy named Elias looks for passage off world after his whole family was caught in the fatal still-going destruction caused by a long dead Terror Artist, and his passage will take him through Neom with his only possession of value - an artifact of the Terror Artist that promises potential destruction. And in Neom itself, a weary Robot who once waged war across land and space has decided to dig up an artifact from his past, which if restored could change everything.

And for people like Mariam, for the Robot, for Elias, and the others who wind up in Neom, well who knows what upheaval will do to their futures?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Neom is in some ways a book without a plot, like say Becky Chambers' Wayfarer books. That's where that comparison basically ends here, beause Neom is not some idealized future, even as it largely takes place ostensibly in a city promoted by modern day Saudi Autocrats to be such a thing. Instead Neom is a story of characters striving to do things - whether that be Mariam working multiple small jobs that wind up putting her in the right place at the right time repeatedly, or Elias trying to escape the world to the Stars by hawking his one valuable possession to the right buyer and finding himself making friends with people he never expected, or the Robot trying to resurrect what it considers its greatest mistake by bringing the golden man artifact back to life - and what they encounter along the way. The world that each of these characters live in is not some idealized world, its one that is crappy in many ways like our own in its inequality and usage of those who are of lower class or of non-human species...but it's one these people can perservere to possibly find something for.

And Neom tells these stories beautifully, whether that be of the Robot (who probably gets the most time in page-length) and its quest, or of Mariam simply doing her jobs and encountering all these oddities...as well as encountering a man in Nasir who might actually be interested in giving her some company, or of Elias as he learns more about himself and the world...be that friendship, or the strangeness of other humans and creatures, or more. The setting remains utterly delightfully weird at times - Jackals with personality who can talk, strange hermits seemingly on the spectrum in the Desert who live on trade, abandoned spaceships, robots broken apart by war, terror artists creating art through mass destruction, etc. etc. But Tidhar infuses all of these oddball aspects of the setting with depth and life and with such great dialogue such that they're both delightful to read about and never feel like something artificial and weird just for the sake of being weird.

And unlike Central Station for me (and I think I'm a minority opinion here just to be clear), all of these stories come together marvelously in the end. It all fits really really well, and each of the major characters and most of the minor characters are just really delightful to read and learn about...even some like a Butterfly collecting robot weapons that have bit parts that make you smile in the end. There's no central conflict, but the stories all have a journey that brings them all together in Neom, and it is, I guess I can best put it, beautiful.

Highly recommended short read.

Published by Tachyon Publications on November 9, 2022

Can robots have religion? A robot messiah known as the Golden Man parts the Red Sea in Neom, a sea that is polluted by the remains of smart matter. Other robots, built for war, follow the Golden Man. But will they destroy the city of Neom in the same way they turned New Punt to dust centuries earlier?

Neom is an actual place. The brainchild of a Saudi prince, Neom is a smart city (it’s advertised as a “cognitive city”) north of the Red Sea and east of Egypt in northeastern Saudi Arabia. Neom is also a science fiction novel set in the distant future. Part of the novel takes place in Neom.

The future Neom is in the same location, but it is now “a mammoth metropolitan area.” The Central Station spaceport near Tel Aviv is a short flight from Neom. Central Station is the title of Lavie Tidhar’s 2017 novel that begins the future history he continues here.

The spaceport ties Neom to the inhabited solar system. Wars have been fought. Some of the detritus of war, including talking jackals and machines that are either sentient or pretending to be, roam the desert outside of Neom. They have nothing else to do.

Residents of Neom are either privileged by wealth or serving the privileged. Mariam grew up in Neom and never left. Like other poor people in Neom, she takes on all the work she can find. She cleans the homes of rich people. Hiring a human cleaner is a status symbol, a step up from using a general-purpose household robot.

Among her other jobs, Mariam sells flowers. She sells a rose to an old robot who becomes one of the novel’s central characters. The robot had a name at one point, but it refuses to share that name with humans. The robot was constructed as a humanoid war machine but was repurposed before it gained the freedom of obsolescence.

Tidhar works seamless backstories into the novel without disturbing its flow with obvious exposition. We learn about the robot’s travels to other worlds, its interaction with other robots, and its knowledge of war and terrorartists.

Mariam also works for Mukhtar’s Bazaar of Rare and Exotic Machines. Mukhtar sometimes makes business deals of questionable legality, but the law is loosely enforced in Neom. Nasir, a law enforcement officer in Neom, spends most of his time writing tickets for littering and admiring Mariam.

Saleh is a child who managed to escape when his father was frozen in time, forever dying in an explosion that was manufactured by a terrorartist using a time-dilation bomb, “the final installation of a mad artist who took delight in destruction and death.” Saleh and his father used a portable generator to protect themselves as they scavenged the site for artifacts. Something went wrong, leaving Saleh to fend for himself. Saleh joins a caravan and makes his way to Neom, where he interacts with Mukhtar and Mariam (and eventually with the robot) as he tries to raise money to book passage to Mars, where he hopes to begin a new life.

Much of the plot surrounds the old robot’s quest to restore to life the Golden Man. The Golden Man has a heart (power source) and something the robot regards as a soul. The nature of the soul and of the Golden Man is a bit ambiguous. These are mysteries the reader is meant to ponder. I was enchanted by the story and happily mystified by its unanswered questions.

Whether robots can have a soul depends on whether souls exist and, if so, what they are and whether they are confined to humans. When fighting robots have no war to fight, they are left to wonder about their purpose. What do they do when they are too old or outdated to serve humans? One became a toilet on a spacecraft for two centuries to better understand bodily function. Some formed a monastery so they could try to understand God, to divine a purpose for their continued existence.

All of this — and much more that I haven’t touched upon — is fascinating. It draws from familiar themes of science fiction without dwelling on them, then peppers the story with new and creative ideas. The novel is short but eventful, always in motion but not driven by action. Perhaps because of its emphasis on robots, but primarily because it is such a quiet novel, Neom reminded me of Clifford D. Simak’s groundbreaking science fiction. Just as Neom is a cognitive city, Neom is a cognitive novel — a story to think about and, in the end, to appreciate as an innovative work in a genre that is too often stagnant.

RECOMMENDED

Interesting ideas and characters but the meandering narrative with slow plot development didn't make me invested enough in the characters and the plot to give this book more than 3 stars.
I will though read other books by this author and hope they are more engaging.

Another masterpiece collection of stories by one of the greatest voices in science fiction. Original, compelling, pageturner, witty, clever, interesting and engaging. Tidhar writes the best characters and the best scenarios for them. I am in love with this book.

Compelling world building is a scale with details on one side and ambiguities on the other. A real world needs details: politics, religions, economies, arts, even sciences. The trick is knowing when to not explain these things. Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station is one of my favorite settings because, as a reader, I’m simply dropped into the world and maybe a reference is explained, maybe it isn’t.

The city of Neom is near Central Station. The story is (mostly) Earthbound, but it’s still a mash-up of space opera and fable, where an old robot takes a rose into the desert and digs up a buried automaton messiah. Neom is situated between Mecca and Bethlehem, so I’m sure there are allegories to be had here, but biblical comparisons feel too mundane and not mythical enough.

The characters in Neom are somewhat coincidental to the plot, but that plays into the feeling of predestination. Of course Miriam, with her half a dozen part-time jobs, is always where the story is taking place and of course Nasir and Saleh have items that are needed. The robot characters are more interesting and I’m glad a few of them might live on in other stories.

Neom is a beautifully imagined novel in the world of Central Station written by Lavie Tidhar. Released 8th Nov 2022 by Tachyon, it's 224 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout. I've really become enamored of ebooks with interactive formats lately. 

This is such an engaging story, told in such lush and exquisitely crafted prose that I was swept away from the first few pages. At its heart, it's a story of longing and family, beauty and danger, and a coming of age adventure with a clever and loyal young protagonist who has a dream and a path to follow. There are several disparate plot threads which wind closer throughout the book though it never comes to a clean denouement and resolution. There are glimpses of overarching themes which center around the interplanetary hub from Tidhar's earlier book but most of the book is word pictures and allegory.

There are also glimpses of homage to the great SF writers of yesteryear, especially Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury (mostly in the prose - Tidhar can write). It's not derivative in any way, but I did get a definite vibe in places. Although it's the second book set in this world, readers who haven't yet read Central Station won't have any trouble keeping up.

The unabridged audiobook version of the book has a run time of 5 hours and 15 minutes and is expertly read by Rasha Zamamiri. She has a rich, lightly accented, alto voice and does a beautiful job of delineating the large number of characters. She enunciates clearly and well and is never difficult to understand in any way (no mumbling). Sound and production quality were high throughout the read. I alternated between print and audio for this read and when I was reading the print version of the book, I found myself "hearing" her voice for the characters and narration which is high praise. 

Four stars for both the audio and print formats of the book. Highly recommended. 

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

4.5 stars.
“Neom” is not a particularly long work, but Lavie Tidhar manages to pack a phenomenal amount worldbuilding into this book, along with fascinating characters. Focusing on three individuals: Mariam, young Saleh, and a robot built long before, Tidhar has their lives intersect in Neom, a slick-seeming city, surrounded by desert and obsessed with the new. People can depart from Neom to Central Station (a book I have yet to read), and the wider, colonized solar system, and all its wild and woolly differences and fascinating expressions of culture and form that have evolved away from earth.

There has also been years of war in the past, in which the robot was a participant, and former squad mate of terrifying war machines that wander the empty desert surrounding Neom.


I can’t even tell you what specifically made me love this book, but I just know I was entranced the whole time I was reading it. I liked Mariam a lot, and how she kept showing up everywhere, thanks to her multitude of jobs (a necessity for many locals) in Neom and the rose she gives to the robot, and what that precipitates. The idea of terrorartists was both intriguing and reprehensible, especially as we see the effects of one terrorartist’s work on young Saleh, whose life takes a dramatic turn consequently. And I LOVED Anubis the noded jackal, who watches a very long-running soap opera from Mars. Then there is the awesomely diverse way life is expressed outwards from Earth…..This book was fantastic!

Thank you to Netgalley and to Tachyon Publications for this ARC in exchange for my review.

Another fantastic and lyrical fable (with SF trappings) from Lavie Tidhar. Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman and Ray Bradbury.

Award winning science fiction and fantasy author Lavie Tidhar returns to the world of his breakthrough novel Central Station in Neom. Some readers may be aware that Neom is a Saudi Arabian concept for a futuristic, sustainable city to be built in the desert on the shore of the Red Sea. At the moment it is nothing more than a glitzy website and an airstrip but Tidhar projects the ideas hundreds of years into his already imagined and rich future and uses the city as the basis for this novel.
The plot of Neom is built around a diverse cast of characters. Mariam is a cleaner in the city of Neom, she lives in a poorer part of town and does a range of odd jobs around the city. Nasir is a childhood friend of Mariam, now part of the Neom police force, who finds himself investigating strange occurrences out in the desert. And Saleh is the last survivor of a tribe of scavengers who has found a rare and possibly dangerous artefact and is than taken in by Bedouins before finding his way to Neom. In and around these characters is an ancient humanoid robot who first appears in the flower market buying a rose from Mariam. The robot is on a mission, a mission that will draw in the others and a mysterious former terrorartist and possibly spell the end of the city.
Being Tidhar, the setting and plot of Neom draws on, pays homage to and plays with a range of science fiction and pop culture standards. Asimov, Herbert, Clarke, Dick, Rucker and a range of others all get referenced either directly or subtly. But tale also tackles issues of religion and belief and the nature of intelligence. All within a framework of a richly imagined universe which Tidhar has built out and expanded far the world of Central Station. So much so that Neom comes with a glossary which fills in some of the detail that sits behind some of the casual references.
Neom appears in a year that has also seen the release of Maror, Tidhar’s excoriating alternative history of modern Israel, Neom shows that he has not lost his ability to be insightful and playful. Built on memorable characters in a deeply imagined solar system, contemplative and full of both terror and wonder, Neom is another must-read for science fiction fans.