Neom by Lavie Tidhar 🤖 🏜 🚀

Set far in the future, Neom is a port city for Earth and space travel. War fought by machines has ravaged the desert outside the city in the past, but Neom is presently at peace. Caravans roam the desert searching for scraps to sell. A robot who has recently arrived in Neom also ventures into the desert, but he knows where to go to uncover a golden man who will change the future of the city.

This is a beautifully complex science fiction story set in Tidhar’s Central Station universe, but it is a stand-alone novel. You meet several characters on their own journeys and the plot progresses based on seemingly disconnected storylines. Themes from Judaism and Christianity are present through the book, along with other aspects of Middle Eastern history and culture. This is a book I will be thinking about for weeks and might need to re-read to appreciate all the layers. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ -J


Thank you for this #gifted ARC from @netgalley @tachyonpub @lavietidhar

#QOTD: What is a genre you don’t usually read that you want to try?

The book takes place in a distant future where Neom is an old city obsessed with all things new. Humanity has colonized much of our solar system, and it seems that city-states are the norm. Neom is located in the Arabian peninsula, and we spend nearly all of the book in and around this city and the desert that surrounds it. The story follows a few humans whose lives intersect with several robots who are changing the future for robot-kind. I found the world of the book to be extremely compelling — it feels lived-in and realistic, while also managing to be very creative and unlike any other sci fi world I have read about. I look forward to reading other stories the the author has written in this world.

I finished the book in two sittings — it felt more like a novella than a novel, and it almost seems to be setting up other works. I gave it three stars rather than four for the following reasons. The characters and the plot were a bit thin — it felt like we were building towards an action that never came, or perhaps will come in a future book. I also felt that the writing felt unfinished in places — the author would write a compelling scene in “real time” and then in the next sentence or paragraph, weeks will have passed. I found this a bit jarring and it also made it difficult to connect with any of the characters.

However, the author does an excellent job of setting the scene and making you curious about this expansive world he has created, so I am excited to follow the author going forward!

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

In Neom, Lavie Tidhar, returns to the universe of Central Station, his wonderful collection of linked short stories, though not to Central Station itself, which is only name-checked a few times. Instead, the setting is the titular city, an extrapolation into the far, far future of a city that today exists mostly as plans and dreams in Saudi Arabia (though you can fly into Neom Airport). Neom is a city “that valued nothing old, and chased the future,” a city that is “ever new, brash, a place for making new things and selling new things.” A city for the rich.

But Tidhar is not interested in either the rich or the shiny new. Instead, the focus here is
on a diverse group of Neom’s less fortunate inhabitants (or recent entries), including Mariam, holder of multiple low-paying jobs; Nasir, an old friend (and maybe a future more than friend) who now works as a city policeman; Mukhtan, one of Mariam’s employers and a dealer in ancient tech and rare artifacts; Saleh, a Bedouin orphan who hopes to see what lies beyond the desert and beyond Earth itself; Saleh’s companion, Anubis, a talking jackal augmented for an old war; and a very old humanoid robot who acts as a catalyst to change all their lives, as well as the foundation of the city itself.

Neom isn’t quite a series of linked stories as Central Station was, but it reads quite similarly, with the chapters reading almost like mini-stories and with the characters often arriving serially rather than all together, and with some of their scenes involving them relating the story that led them to this particular time and place, adding to the sense of an independent short story. That isn’t to say a linear narrative doesn’t exist; it does. But really the pleasure in Neom lies more in its characterization, mood, faceted structure, and rich world-creation than its forward plot motion.

But to start with that motion, it motion involves first getting the characters together via various chance meetings: Saleh meets Anubis after taking up temporarily with a trading caravan, the robot meets Mariam at one of her jobs (the flower market) than at another one (Muktah’s place), Nasir meets the robot when it goes into the desert to dig up a fabled artifact (a Golden Man, thought by many to be mere legend), and so on.

The Golden Man is in some way connected to the “terrorartists”, an movement from long ago that specialized in mass murder: “the terrorartists seeded destruction like gardeners planting trees … When you plant an olive tree you don’t do it for yourself but for your descendants. They did the same with death … For terror and awe went together, and people still came to gawk at Sandoval’s ‘Earthrise’ or the time-frozen destruction of Rohini’s Jakarta bomb on Java.” Saleh too is connected to the terrorartists; his entire family killed excavating in a still-active “installation … the whole place suspended in a sort of still-ongoing explosion, but if you wear a null suit you can navigate through the temporality maze.” Saleh was the only one to survive, and he came out with the time-dilation bomb, which he hopes to sell in Neom so he can make his way off Earth. Eventually all these meetings and connections to the past (including ancient wars) culminate in a climax I won’t spoil here.

The terrorartist movement is a prime example of Tidhar’s lush imagination and also for how he applies that imagination to his world-building. Rather than spend a lot of pages detailing each and every element of his world: the flora, the fauna, the economy, the transportation systems, etc., he simply drops in brief asides — a word here, a sentence there, a paragraph (rarely) there. And so we get drop-in moments on the terror-artists, on Mars colonies, pirates in the outer system, hugely powerful Ais, incomprehensible creatures (aliens? Constructs?) in the Oort cloud, various types of robots, various wars, and more., In his brevity and concision, he reminds me of Ursula K. LeGuin, someone I’ve long said did more with less than any other author I know (a skill I’ve often wished more writers had or employed). Tidhar shows a similar ability to create an entirety from as little detail as possible, a concretion of seemingly disparate facts that adds up to a fully realized world. As an added bonus, a lot of these quick details contain in-jokes for genre fans, referencing works by Bradbury, Asimov, C.L. Moore, Dick, and others (and I’m sure some I didn’t recognize).

As for the characters, each of them is searching for something to fill an absence (often unnamed, unknown) in their lives, though no matter what it might be in their heads its often simply a sense of connection to another. At the end of chapter one, Mariam thinks, “it would be nice to have someone bring her flowers,” and the mention of Neom “filled Saleh with a longing he could not articulate.” The robot tells Mariam he and fellow robots have “not so much a belief as a quest … We do not know why we exist. Now that we no longer serve humanity, who do we serve? How do we live?” and the talking jackal, when asked by Sahel why he joined him on his way to Neom, can’t say why, only that he “grew tired with the desert.” Some sense their longing, some sense it in others, as when one character warns Saleh “You can’t run away … Even in space you’d still just be yourself,” while Mariam thinks “the robot seemed lonely to her,” and later, when Sahel and Anubis arrive, she thinks both look “lost.”

Along with this theme of longing, Tidhar also explores the long-term consequences of war and trauma, as when Mukhtan, cataloging the robot’s body parts, asks “lost your leg in the war?” and the robot replies, “I lost a lot of things in the war.” Or, more generally, the world is filled with remnants of past conflicts, wandering the cities, roaming the desert, swimming the oceans. War, in this universe, never fades away, even if they were so long ago the humans no longer remember their names.

Similarly, what happens with Sahel’s family — trapped in the time-dilation of the terrorart — is a wonderful metaphor for grief and trauma. He describes to another character how “The explosion, Dahab, everything? It’s still going on. My father, my uncle, they’re still inside it. An endless death still happening.” And isn’t this how death works, in whatever form it comes when it does come for our loved ones? An endless grief that ripples outward like the explosive bubble and that may diminish over time but never fully disappears?

Whether or not these victims of war and trauma and grief find a way to heal, whether or not those seeking basic human connection (including non-humans, raising the question of just how one defines “human”) find what they long for, I’ll leave for you to find out by reading this book. Because, and so far I think I can say this about every Tidhar story I’ve picked up, you should read this book, even if it doesn’t have quite the impact of his best work (and choosing amongst his books for that title would be difficult). At this point, if I could auto-purchase Tidhar book like I auto-pay my bills, I’d sign up for that service.

Lavie Tidhar is a name that has popped up several times in my short fiction reading—I’ve read a few of his stories, and I have a collection he edited on my shelf—but while I knew he’d also written novels that had garnered lots of positive reviews, none were the sort of books that genre fans constantly push to my attention, and his longer work had languished on the "read eventually" pile. But when I saw he was writing a standalone novel in the world of Central Station, I decided to request the ARC of Neom and try his extended work for myself.

To be clear, Neom is not especially extended. I don’t have access to an official word count, but it’s only a couple hundred Kindle locations longer than works marketed as novellas, and I’d be surprised if it hit 50,000 words. But compact size does not mean a compact cast, and Neom delivers at least seven perspective characters who find themselves pulled in to a dangerous quest in a far-future Arabia dotted with dangerous relics from robot wars and terrorartists.

Despite robot wars and an audacious science fiction setting that currently exists only in the dreams of a Saudi prince, the storytelling in Neom resembles mythology much more closely than thriller. The perspective always seems to come from over the characters’ shoulders more than in their heads, and the character whose quest ultimately becomes the focal point doesn’t even appear for several chapters. It’s a short novel, but it’s simultaneously a story that takes its time, letting the reader experience the world and the lives of several characters on its periphery instead of rushing toward a central plot.

If the tale has a lead, it’s a battered robot, veteran of countless conflicts in which its hand was forced to violence by its human creators. And the tale’s heart is undoubtedly a love story, of facing down dangers of staggering scale in order to reunite with a long-separated companion. But this is a novel that’s just as interested in the stories at the margins of the world as it is the ones that could possibly end it, with the wild Pokémon at a home for digital refugees given as much screen time as the cosmic horrors lurking beyond the Oort Cloud. And while I tend to dislike books that bury the story in mountains of extraneous lore, Neom doesn’t feel like a book that’s trying to show off all the details of the universe. In fact, some of the world’s most influential hubs (like Central Station) are almost entirely ignored. For all the mythic stylings and AI leads, it’s a very human story, about personal struggles—small and large—in a radically transformed world.

As someone who prefers a tighter character focus and a more contemporary style, I could honestly read this far in my own review and assume I wouldn’t like this book. I've already talked about struggling with too much time spent on worldbuilding, and the slight detachment from the characters paired with an elevated, mythic style sure sounds like just what I bounced off when Ursula Le Guin was doing it in the Earthsea series. But there’s something about the execution that just drew me to Neom. Surely one element is just the quality of the prose, and the short novel length kept the narration style from overstaying its welcome. But it’s not like there aren’t other short works with stylistic similarities that I've disliked. Perhaps it’s as simple as eschewing the epic hero in favor of smaller, more relatable stories—opening with a woman from a poor district working three or four part-time jobs, and never losing that small-scale feel even when the world itself is in danger. But whatever it is, I liked Neom a lot. I won’t say that every single perspective was jaw-dropping, and I’m not sure there’s a one that’s going to anchor itself in my mind and not let go. But it’s a beautiful and touching tapestry, certainly among my favorites of the year.

Recommended if you like: future myth, literary sci-fi.

Overall rating: 17 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.

After reading Central Station a few years ago and loving it, I was beyond excited to read Tidhar’s latest sci fi novel, Neom, set in the same world. Tidhar has always been a writer with an amazing imagination, so I had high expectations for his latest story.

And I have to say he delivered! Tidhar’s a masterful world-builder, especially if you are reading this book with the context of Central Station in mind. But even if you haven’t read Central Station, it’s still an immersive, literary sci fi, rich in ideas and creativity.

From mecha to giant buried robots, from desert nomads to a boy and his jackal companion, Tidhar’s creates a rich and detailed world in a short amount of time. His fictional city, Neom, is based on the construction and vision of a real life city also called Neom, which plans on incorporating smart city technology but also placing a high value on the environment. Tidhar envisions what a city like this might be like in a world set in the not too distant future.

While I do think that Tidhar’s character work is the weakest part of his writing, each character brought something interesting into the overall conversation of the book. All the character development was subtle and nuanced. The characters were used to discuss thought-provoking ideas and expand on the rich themes being explored.

If you love literary science fiction, if you love a slow story rich in detail and ideas, and if you appreciate an author who places a high premium on originality, that I’d highly recommend picking up Neom.

*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for the digital arc. All opinions are my own.

My thanks to both NetGalley and Tachyon Publications for an advanced copy of this science fiction novella.

As a reader I have always been drawn to science fiction stories that seem timeless. Not just long ago and far, far away, but the stories that you know have to be taking place in the future, but the reader doesn't know when or why. Where robots and caravans mix, people have to hustle to make ends meet, the words of the Prophet are still spoken even in the shadow of a grand city that will take people to different planets. Neom by Lavie Tidhar is a novella that takes place in the same universe as his book Grand Central Station, and continues Tidhar's ideas of a future where man is still around, robots abound and love is still a very strong emotion.

The book begins with Mariam, a young woman who works many jobs in the city of Neom, which sits among the desert, close to the Red Sea and near the Grand Central Station, mankind's transportation to other worlds. Mariam cleans apartments, works at a shelter for computer images that continue to live on long past their games,at a technology trader, and selling flowers, to support her mother in a rest home and herself. While selling flowers she meets a robot who purchases from her a rose. Over the next few days Mariam keeps encountering this robot in her various side- hustles, feeling more and more uncomfortable as she does. In the meantime Elias is a young man who finds himself suddenly orphaned, as his people are caught in a literally time bomb, left behind by the terrorartists who once plagued the people. Elias wants nothing but a ride into the stars, to get away from his scavenger life, and see new things. Meanwhile a very dangerous person returns from space, brought back by a long forgotten alarm, ready to cause problems on the planet she had fled long ago. And in the desert robotic creatures, weapons and victims or previous wars begins to gather and march on the city.

No description I can write will fully encompass what happens in this book. For a novella there are ideas on each page that entire series would be based on. The mix of future, with the history of the past, the ideas that make the characters able to deal with their lives, and their ability to fight for their city are written clear and make sense. Each character has a meaning in this story, and each character is given a reason to be in the story, not just a plot point, or oh I need a character for this scene, which is so common in other books. The city of Neom is fascinating and in need of more exploration and description in future books, but that can be said about so much that Tidhar writes about. The writing is very clear, and flows well, there is no learning curve, as Tidhar has the ability to put the reader in the story, and fill around the reader with words that don't seem like an info dump, or even worse, pointless. Science fiction always has a problem with emotion, it either seems fake, or it seems well we have to add something, lets try this. Tidhar has no problem with emotion, it comes right from the page, and shows in the characters and the story.

One of the best science fiction books I have read in awhile, and I have read a lot this year. Tidhar has the skill and the ideas to make his stories really stand out. I have never been disappointed reading anything by him, or thought that he was phoning a story in. The ending notes for the story are interesting also, sharing where the plot came from and how different ideas came together. You don't have to have read Grand Central Station, to enjoy this, but I highly recommend it. As I recommend anything Lavie Tidhar has written.

This was such a treat. It has been a good while since I read anything like this. This was sci-fi with a lot of common sci-fi elements and yet it was distinctly human in the themes it explored.

The writing was simple and to the point. The characters were easy to sympathize with and understand, even the robots! The story's threads were nicely woven and I liked how easily and naturally they came together.

Maybe the conclusion of the plot was a little too easy and a little too quick and perhaps an extra 50 or so pages would have made it a more fleshed out story, but it may well be that its strength is in that simplicity. Maybe the world does not need to be complicated and solutions can be so clean. Wouldn't that be nice?

I will definitely seek out more by this author, because this was right up my street. I think if you like an almost cozy type sci-fi story a la Becky Chambers, you may well enjoy this one.

This is the first book I’ve read of this author and it won’t be the last. This is a novella, but still felt like a full story. There are several people (and robots) that intersect within the city of Neom and all are looking for something. It isn’t a faced paced plot by any means, this is much more of an emotional story. I look forward to picking up other books by this author.

Neom by Lavie Tidhar is an incredible little novel telling the story of a varied cast of characters coming together to change the future of a city, all in the name of love and a red rose. At first this book will read almost like separate short stories but gradually the characters come together to, what was for me, an unexpected but amazing climax.
The story follows a group of characters starting with Miriam, a young woman who is working several jobs (including that of a flower seller) just to get by in this big city. Neom is a city of the ‘new’ things and consequently it takes a lot to survive for a woman on her own, supporting an ailing relative. Her childhood friend Nasir works as a shurta, one of the peace keeping officers in the city. Outside the city we meet Saleh and eventually Jackal, two desert dwellers driven by circumstance into the city. Finally we meet Nasu, a terrorartist and the robot. The robot is nameless but is ultimately the driving figure of the story, both grieving and seeking love. Nasu is ominous, a killer but one seemingly without purpose, that adds an edge of tension to the story.
There is so much here I loved. Two of my favorites were two of the biggest themes or ideas explored. The idea of Terrorartists, people who created ‘art’ from terror. Like a bomb with the tiny heart of a black hole that detonated and trapped people in their moment of death forever. That’s both horrifying but almost believable, almost something I can see someone doing in the ‘name of art’. I have a degree in art so this is something that really tickles my interest and was so fascinating here. The other highlight for me were the robots and UXOs and other mechanic beings we were told about. The depth and breadth of these creations and their consequent history we’re fed in tidbits throughout the tale were amazing.
Overall this story and the world it’s set in are amazing to me. It feels as if we got just a snapshot of an event that ultimately might have gone under the radar for most of this world. There was so much of the almost mundanity of life that this felt poignant but small in the ultimate scope in a way that has me wanting more. I am definitely going to download and seek out far more of Mr. Tidhar’s work moving forward.

5 Electric Sheep out of 5

A beautifully-written short novel with intricate and rich world-building, Neom is a novel I wish were longer.

I believe you would call this novel a “future history,” as, rather than writing in a fictional universe where Earth exists in the general sense, it’s more about speculation into how the future is derived from our actual earth - with all our history and current events. In this regard, it’s rooted in realism, which makes the sci-fi aspects (space travel, A.I., humans being constantly connected to the internet) seem plausible (and thus fascinating).

I loved the world-building. The city as well as the desert surrounding it, the latter filled with ancient roaming robots, genetically enhanced animals that can speak, and abandoned technology. The latter aspect was my favourite.

Unfortunately, when it came to the plot, the story ends a little bit anticlimactic on all accounts. We have people coming together and storylines resolved, but some readers might be tempted to say, “Okay, so what?” I thought the resolution was refreshing, but the novel was too short to make the climax impactful. This is less about the thin plot (which I didn't have an issue with, as this novel feels more like a “slice of life” than a space opera), but more so that there are quite a few characters and just when we really start to get to know them and develop tension, the story ended. I liked the characters quite a bit - everyone seems rather “normal,” with their main concern finding their place in the world - and I do wish we’d gotten more time with them.

I am definitely interested in reading more of this author’s other (preferably novel-length) work. His style and prose are lovely and engaging, and I love the world he's created. I highly recommend this novel for people who like their sci-fi on the “what will the future look like” side rather than action-based, have an interest in A.I. sentience, and like a slow, thoughtful story about connection and love.

Lavie Tidhar's new novel (to be published in November 2022), Neom, is hard to describe, let alone review. It takes place in Tidhar's Central Station universe, but Central Station itself does not play much of a role in the book; in fact, it is only mentioned a few times. What Neom is, among other things, is yet another love letter to science fiction of the past. It is no secret that Tidhar grew up on and loves old science fiction, and he pays homage to it here again, just as he did in CENTRAL STATION. Neom takes place not far from Central Station, and it is a destination for one of the characters, Saleh, who wishes to get there to leave the planet and head to the stars. (As a side note, there is a futuristic city of dreams being built in Saudi Arabia, itself called Neom. The dreams it will purportedly hold, when complete, will be similar to what the denizens of the novel of the same name encounter when they get there. I was completely unaware of this when I read the novel, and only found out about it after I finished reading it.)

NEOM is a novel of many things: love, family, discovery, robots, people just hoping to survive, police officers justifying their existence, orphans, flowers, and much more. All of these thing entwine and entangle with each other. Mariam and Nasir are childhood friends; Nasir is a police officer questioning his job, as all he does is write tickets for loitering. Mariam works several odd and varied jobs trying to make ends meet. One of those
jobs is in a flower shop, where a robot comes in looking for a rose. Unbeknownst to Mariam at the time, the nameless robot is looking to resurrect the "golden man", something that is important to him for more than one reason, and one of those reasons is very surprising to him. The nameless robot reunites Mariam and Nasir; Nasir has feeling for Mariam, and we see that the theme of love, which runs throughout the novel, is a part of the story of these two characters.

Each of the characters within Neom have their own story, their own reason why they contribute to the whole. While this is most likely obvious to everyone, there are times that we don't think about that until we are hit over the head with a metaphorical hammer. Saleh, for example, has an artifact that he wants
to sell in order to generate the funds he needs to get to Central Station and leave the planet. The artifact is believed to be something left over from a long ago war waged by mechs, robots among them. A terrorartist (the concept of the terrorartist brings one of the best lines of the novel: "Terror, Rohini said, was art: 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?"), Nasu, comes to Neom for reasons related to the golden man. And who is the golden man? We find out that he is a weapon from the wars of the past, but why does the nameless robot want to awaken him? And what will be the power source that is the final piece of the puzzle that brings the golden man to life? And what will the golden man do once he comes to life (we get something of a clue as to what the golden man is to the rest of the mechs with the line "The golden man raised its hands, and the Red Sea, which was filled to the brim with the waste and remains of smart matter, began to part at its command.", invoking visions of Moses in the Old Testament.

As I said earlier, Tidhar uses Neom to pay homage to past science fiction novels: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm..." and "Those who follow the Way of Robot designate themselves with an R. prefix." reminds us of Isaac Asimov. "What do robots dream about? Nasir said", and "Do robots dream?" Nasir said, before he could stop himself" bring up memories of Philip K. Dick. Tidhar also makes a reference to Arthur C. Clarke, which the reader just might miss if they were not paying attention, referring to "the forbidden moon of Europa"..

But Tidhar does provide commentary on the field today, with "They do not like old things here, much. Always with the new. They forget the new becomes the old, and that they will be just as old and obsolete in their turn." In speaking about the world of today, he says "in a world that was always connected there was enormous value in being unplugged."

The more of Tidhar's work that I read, the more he becomes one of my favorite writers. No, I haven't read everything of his, but at some point I feel as if I will catch up and read all of it. He is one of the outstanding writers of modern times in the field of science fiction and fantasy. Neom is a wonderful addition to the field, and I look forward to his next novel.

The war was over. They were free. But the robot was lost.
from Neom by Lavie Tidhar

“This was in the old days, when the robot and its comrades were busy fighting in the endless wars,” when the robot had been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt into a perfect killing machine, sick of the war. Back when it met the golden man, a perfect weapon with a charismatic power, a Messiah weaving a dream of harmony and the end of war. The golden man’s call to “follow me” gathered all the mechs and robots and they moved across the land. And when they were done, the wars had ended, the golden man buried in the ruins. The robots became homeless wanderers across space, antiquities, feared, dismantled for parts. But this one robot remembered its promise to the golden man.

“I remember loving, the golden man said, it said in wonder. “I remember loving and being loved.”
from Neom by Lavie Tidhar

A boy whose city is caught in a never ending explosion joins a caravan to travel to the city. The only thing he has of value is a mysterious artifact. He does not know that it is a vital part needed by the robot, or will become part of a machine that could destroy or save humanity. The boy only knows that he wants to escape Earth and a future “salvaging old tech in the crumbling, rotting, endless maze of kitsch architecture on the Ghost Coast.” He is determined to get to Central Station, the gateway hub to the universe.

Lavie Tidhar returns the world of Central Station with Neom, a mesmerizing read of war’s legacy, and robots and love, a story of destruction that end with hope. Informed by ancient myth and with characters from popular culture– furbys and Pac-mans and Gojira–and with nods to Philip K. Dick and religious traditions, my head was spinning with associations.

The sorrowful robot wonders about its purpose in life; “Now that we no longer serve humanity, who do we serve? How do we live? We feel abandoned, in some way. And we are old. The world has rather passed us by.” It talks to Mariam, a flower seller, who give it a rose, a symbol of love and grief, which it takes on its quest.

Neom is a most unusual story. It is a reflection of the world we are making and the future we may have, and yet even the robots themselves pattern behavior that can save us. Love.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Neom should appeal to fans of literary science fiction and slow narratives. This story is about many things, such as the robot's search for a lost love. The world building is rich and imaginative, and the characters'personal stakes are high, making their arcs relatable. I liked the book, although I admit it took me some time to finish it because it's a moody read.

By Paul Weimer: Lavie Tidhar’s Neom is a stunning return to his world of Central Station, twinning the fates of humans and robots alike at a futuristic city on the edge of the Red Sea.

There has been a town at the place called Tabuk for hundreds of years, possibly as much as two thousand. In the future of Lavie Tidhar’s novel, that town has become, grown and become a mecca for technology and industry, a city of the future, not far away from the dangers of the desert, and the glamour and connections of Central Station. A place built on capital and money, a place built on the idea that anything can be fixed, can be improved, can be made better. A place with the promise of a new world that can be just as real, if not more so, than the world that has come before. A sprawling metropolis, glittering near the Red Sea.

This is Neom. This book is the city’s story.

No, that’s not right.

Meet The Golden Man. The Golden Man is a robot. You can’t quite meet The Golden Man yet because the Golden Man is broken, dead in fact. But with the right person to repair him, and with the right power source, the Golden Man might be called forth again. Events, fate, might conspire to bring the people with the right talents, and the right tech to bring together a robot who might command other robots–all the other robots sleeping, buried, lost in the wilderness of desert and the bottom of the Red Sea. A lot of robots, left over from many wars. What might happen when the Golden Man awakes?

This book is that robot’s story.

No that’s not right either.

Trying to describe the novel in terms of a single story, or a single character not only isn’t accurate, but it defeats the beauty and the power of the story that Tidhar is telling here. Neom is an overlaying set of narratives that hand off with each other, with characters that meet, bifurcate, meet again and all roads eventually end at the aforementioned city. Characters both human, robot, young, ancient, human and relatable, and the otherness of the non-human robots. Wait, no. that’s not right, either. Some of the humans and what they have done, and what they have done is extremely alien.

Take the terrorartists, with their weapons that created art, deadly art in the midst of spreading terror and destruction. Understanding the motives, much less the actual technology that they use, is an exercise in trying to understand the Other. Take the Robotnik nest of Dahab. One, or two wars ago it was a haven for robots. In the fourth war, it suffered a terrorartist attack, and the entire city is suspended and held in an explosion frozen in time, continually going on and on. One of our main characters, a young boy named Saleh, lost his father and uncle in an expedition into the city looking for artifacts and goods to plunder and sell. And it is the object that he carries with him from that tragic expedition gone wrong that could decide the fate of Neom, and beyond.

All the book works like this. The Terrorartist who comes to Neom, Nasu. Elias, the caravaneer. The giant mecha named Esau. Mukhtar, owner of the Bazaar of Rare and Exotic Machines, who always makes tea for his customers and guests, human and robot alike. And others. All of their stories intersect and intertwine and we get to spend time with them, like having a coffee in a cafe with a friend who always has something interesting to say in the next sentence. Stories woven together until they come to a conclusion. I’ve heard the idea of “braided narrative” and that is the technique that Tidhar employs here, using his city of the future as the backdrop for (almost all of it).

And let’s talk about the future that Tidhar describes. It’s an Earth of a future indeterminate, Tidhar is not a writer who fusses with dates and extremely detailed visions. It’s a Middle Eastern future, a multicultural future, a future where history has happened between then and now, but some things remain and are always the same. The hints of the future history are tantalizing in his worldbuilding. Every corner of Neom has something new, like a robotic four armed preacher entreating passerby to seek salvation in the zero-point field. The mysterious Yiwu lottery. Martian Soap Operas.

But what does this book remind me of, besides other work by Tidhar (and not just Central Station)? It’s a vision of the future that makes me think of George Alec Effinger, and Lyda Morehouse, and Tim Maughan, among others. In the afterword, Tidhar calls out the Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith and I can see that influence at work, too. The fragmentary, small pieces of future worldbuilding, like the ones I mentioned here. Tidhar’s worldbuilding is not walls of text explaining the First War, or every Terrorartist attack, or a map of Neom, but it is fragments, glimpses that are written with such verve and power that they expand exponentially, bringing a world, a history to life. Tidhar’s fiction makes you think, it pokes, it prods you, and in the end it makes you, through all of the speculation, and the futurism, it makes you feel for the characters, especially when those characters really don’t look like you or think like you.

No, that’s not right. This is a book of hearts and of the heart, be it human or robot, and that is something that is universal, be it ourselves or in “the other”. The “other”, in Tidhar’s work, is us, and we are the other. We are all us, and in Neom, we feel for that other, in the personage of the robots, in the human characters, and we take them, and their stories, into us.

Now that, that is right.

Neom by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow! What a gut punch!

This is set in the same zeitgeist as Central Station, of which I absolutely adored for not just its unabashed hard-SF nature, its robots, its deserts, it's Tel Aviv atmosphere and post-dystopian nightmare, and its DEEP, deep worldbuilding.

I can't overstate the last enough. It's RICH.

And Neom is, too. Overflowing with imagination, references to fascinating events and people (mostly robots), and places all over the Solar System.

What is most surprising is how easy it is to fall into. It never overwhelms us. It starts with a friendly smile and a shared rose and a slice of life in the desert in Neom. I was heavily charmed and just loved the ride for what it was. It was all about living. Just living. And that includes all the robots AND humans, trying to make their way in a time that doesn't want either of them.

But later? Oh my god... I didn't see that coming but it was so gorgeous, so heartwrenching. And I should explain that it isn't the normal kind of heartwrenching. It caught me unawares. It blindsided me.

And now, after reading this, I want to go back and re-read Central Station just for the sheer pleasure of it. (Knowledge of it is not necessary, but it does deepen the effect.)

I LOVE this. :)

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a free eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Lavie Tidhar’s latest novel, Neom, is set in the same world as his Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominated Central Station. The lives of receptionist and flower-seller Maryam, police officer Nasir, and orphan Saleh intersect through their encounters with a robot engaged in a mysterious serarch.

The world Tidhar crafts in Neom is a wildly imaginative one. The titular city includes a sort of animal shelter for abandoned digital pets, with Tamagotchis and Furbys being name-dropped. Ambulatory relics of old wars, including one modeled on the giant mecha made famous by anime series like Neon Genesis Evangelion wander the surrounding desert. A long-ago terrorist attack has frozen an area in time. Beings that may be super-advanced AIs or gargantuan aliens lurk at the edge of the solar system. This may seem disjointed, but it’s disjointed in a way that feels real. Humans are messy, and a world shaped by the conflicts between and mingling of human cultures probably isn’t always going to be perfectly neat and organized. Tidhar’s worldbuilding choices also give him the opportunity to include Easter egg references to such writers as C.L. Moore, Robert W. Chambers, Isaac Asimov, and H.P. Lovecraft, which I greatly appreciated.

There were a couple of flaws. At one point in the story, we’re told that one of the past wars was ended by the destruction of a city called New Punt, but we’re also told that New Punt “believed themselves safe from the war,” which indicates that they weren’t one of the participants. If they weren’t a party to the war, how did their destruction end it? I also felt like Saleh didn’t receive as much character development as Maryam, Nasir, and the robot, which made it harder to connect to him. Overall, though, I enjoyed the book, and I hope Tidhar continues to write stories in this setting.

This one was a bit of a slow-burner for me.
Neom is a new city, high-tech and full of (mostly) rich, young people. But, of course, the rich "need the poor in order to be rich", and it is amongst the cleaners and policemen and caravanserai that love and war are inextricably entwined.
The writing is excellent, surreal yet touching, perfectly in tune with the android love story that begins when a sad old robot enters the flower-market in the souk, and is given a red rose (we are reminded that it is the flower of both love and death) by Mariam, a serial part-time job holder.
I don't go in too much for romance, but the understated and possibly ill-fated path trodden by the android and his golden man (golem??) was tender and subtle - unlike the many references to characters and episodes from the sci-fi world (the refuge for abandoned Pokémon was laugh-out-loud), although the touches of humour lifted the occasionally oppressive threat of terrorartists, who use art to destroy whole cities.
My thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this book, all opinions expressed are my own.

Neom by Lavie Tidhar - it's set in the same universe as Central Station, in the city of Neom where robots are leftover relics from an old war. One robot feels called to a place in the desert and digs up a "golden man", which can have dangerous consequences.

This book had a wonderful mix of old world location - sand, markets, traditional dress, and future tech - a spaceport with shuttles to various locations in the solar system, digital entities, cyborged humans. It also had the vivid imagery that's become familiar with the author - the sights and smells of the markets, the desolation and heat of the desert. The characters are ordinary, relatable people going about their lives in this unique setting, and there's a philosophical side when one discussed their outlook on life with a robot.

Another great read from this author for me.

(I was given an arc of this book through Netgalley in return for an honest review)
The setting was interesting, but was clearly written with the idea that the reader already knew all of the world's rules. The characters were shallow and not well-developed. There was no clear threat or stakes that the characters faced to make you worried for them. I mostly trekked through the book because the world seemed to interesting to not have a good plot along with it, I was wrong. The whole thing felt like a prologue to a much larger story.
Overall Rating: 2/5