Lavie Tidhar is an Israeli-born writer, living in the UK. His new short novel, Neom, is a return to the world of his 2016 award-winning fix-up novel Central Station. On that future Earth, populated by the descendants of those who travelled to, but failed to emigrate up through the planetary spaceport located near Tel Aviv, there is a city outside the digitally-federated lands of the Judea Palestina Union, on the banks of the Red Sea - Neom. In the past, wars in the region had evolved into fully automated conflicts, so many that nobody can keep track of them all any more. But intelligent and deadly machines still populate the desert.

Mariam de la Cruz lives in the urban sprawl of Neom, holding down a few hourly jobs, sufficient to support herself and the fees of the care facility of her mother. Nasir is an old school friend of Mariam’s, now an ambitionless cop. Salah is a young Bedouin boy possessing an artifact of uncertain value, which he does not know how to sell. He is the only survivor of the Abu-Ala clan, many of whom are now stuck in a time-distortion field triggered by their salvage operations on a former battlefield. Tidhar exposes his gritty, economically depressed world through the eyes of these and other inhabitants of Neom, as they are swept up in a resurgence of forces dispersed and submerged since the time of the last war. It is an engaging story with sympathetic characters, but the real strength is Tidhar’s world-building. For those who watch for such things (like me), there are subtle references to some of the original greats of artificial intelligence in SF – Asimov, Rucker, Clarke, Dick, and even to Moses of the Old Testament. This short novel could be read stand-alone, but I recommend reading both Central Station and Neom.

I read an advance Digital Review Copy of Neom in an ebook format, which I received from Tachyon Publications through netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review on social media platforms and on my book review blog. This new title is scheduled for release on 9 November 2022.

Disfruté muchísimo con la lectura de Central Station, así que cuando vi que se ponía a tiro Neom, una novela situada en el mismo mundo, no dudé ni un momento y me puse a leerla.


Nada más comenzar vemos que Lavie ha decidido cambiar el escenario bajándolo a la Tierra, a esa desconocida ciudad llamada Neom, capaz de atraer robots, humanos, drones… La ciudad está descrita a pinceladas, a través de los ojos del estupendo reparto coral que iremos conociendo en los cortos capítulos con que el autor ha organizado la obra, en una suerte de collage que atrae inmediatamente la atención pero que además tiene varias capas de lectura.

Tidhar aprovecha los conceptos que ya conocíamos de sus relatos anteriores para hacer referencias que harán las delicias del lector que ya conoce esta parte de su obra, pero que también sirven como gancho para el que se aproxime por primera vez a ella. El libro es perfectamente disfrutable como obra aislada, si bien es cierto que la recompensa por la fidelidad al autor también existe.

¿Qué se encontrará el lector que se adentre en Neom? Para empezar, la desbordante imaginación del israelí, capaz de crear terroartistas que pretenden perdurar en el tiempo con las atrocidades que comenten, arqueólogos que investigan ruinas que pueden atraparte en el tiempo, robots veteranos de guerra que como se sobrecalienten pueden convertirse en perfectos asesinos… Pero es una imaginación aunada con un dominio de la prosa estupendo, con el manejo de varios idiomas que le permite la creación de vocables que se ajustan como un guante a los nuevos términos que necesita para este mundo tan distinto y tan similar al nuestro.

Hablo de similitudes porque a pesar de estar situada en el futuro habla de temas tremendamente actuales, como la necesidad de gran parte de la población de tener muchos trabajos distintos para poder sobrevivir o la emigración, considerada como la última oportunidad para tanta gente.

Neom es una novela que me ha entusiasmado, así que no dudéis en haceros con ella conforme salga a la venta, estoy segura de que no os decepcionará.

Tidhar is a very talent author. I've had mixed success enjoying his novels. This one is very good, and I admire his deep thinking and imagination that allow him to create interesting stories. Well done.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Neom really begins with a robot asking for a rose.

The world Neom inhabits is weathered by war and death. Terrorartists once flooded the landscape with their mad obsession for destruction and terror, for terror is their art. Old robots once used for war are now purposeless, wandering the deserts or the space beyond Earth to find new ones.

Despite the horror of a possible war descending once again, rendering a grand feel, I personally felt that the book was quiet, wonderous and intimate with its focus on a small cast and its topics like the fragility of life and existentialism (nihilism and absurdism). I love the discussions surrounding the use of robots from wartimes and how the participants are from each side: the robot from the past or the people (characters) now. It strikes a philosophical tone and a realization that we are, in a way, all that those robots: we are trapped in a box, born into a world propped up by multiple systems that may or may not serve us well, hence all we can really do is move through them and choose what and how we want to be.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tachyon Publications for providing me with the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A fantastic novel in the universe of Central Station. Tidhar is one of the best writers of science fiction. Review coming soon.

Neom es el nombre de la ciudad futurista e inteligente planificada en el noroeste de Arabia Saudí. Se espera que su energía proceda de energía renovables e incorpore tecnologías de inteligencia artificial de ultimo minuto. ¿Cómo será Neom una vez el cambio climático avance, la sociedad colapse y la tecnología iguale, o incluso supere, a la humanidad? Eso es lo que Lavie Tidhar imagina en esta excelente novela.

Compuesta por capítulos relativamente cortos donde somos testigos de escenas cotidianas, la novela nos presenta una ciudad sobrepasada donde conviven con relativa naturalidad humanos, robots o drones. Desigualdades económicas y raciales se juntan con investigaciones policiales, reflexiones sobre el trato a los inmigrantes y, al mismo tiempo, algunas escenas que al mismo tiempo que sencillas despiertan nuestro sentido de la maravilla.

Muchos de estos capítulos bien podrían ser historias cortas independientes. Otros, alternándose, van formado la trama principal de la novela. Una especie de nuevo testamento bíblico con unos protagonistas inesperados.

Esta novela esta ubicada en el mismo mundo en donde se desarrolla una de las novelas anteriores de Tidhar, Estacion Central. No es imprescindible haber leído aquella para disfrutar casi al completo de Neom. Sin embargo, si no lo habéis hecho os recomiendo hacerlo, ya sea antes o después, mas que nada porque considero Estación Central como una de las mejores novelas de ciencia ficción de los últimos años, aunque también tenga sus detractores. Por otro lado, hay un puñado de referencias en Neom que se disfrutan mucho más si has leído aquella novela.

Neom y Estación Central comparten escenario y espíritu. Una manera distinta de imaginar el futuro, donde lenguas, razas, seres y maquinas convivimos al mismo nivel evolutivo. Una novela, para mi gusto, imprescindible.

“The hardest thing to kill is truth.”

This is Central Station, As far as the future and who can say how distant that is?

Beyond Central Station, in the old Saudi desert, where a vast spaceport links Earth to the teeming world of the solar system, there is a city called Neom.

This is a time after mad artists who took delight in destruction and death, making mass death and destruction into art for serving falsehood, a time after assassin robots and in the time of the robotic world.

But this is not the story, STORY is about a few ordinary people in an accidental encounter caus great danger, wake up WAR!

Mariam did not consider herself in the least bit old. It was more of that in-between time, when life finds a way to remind you of both what you’d lost and what lay still ahead.

Mariam had grown up in a city for the rich and the rich needed the poor in order to be rich. Neom was the sole green point across the harsh and unforgiving sand. And one of the things Mariam does for a living is being a florist.

“Flowers fascinate me,” the robot said, ignoring the question. “How humans use them as symbols. As a declaration of love, for instance. Or to signify mourning.”

This was a beautiful book, I am always fascinated by Lavie Tidhar's writing style, the emotion flowing on, the heart you hear its broking sound, it is rare, unique.

Many thanks to Tachyon Publications via NetGalley for giving me chance to read this great book, I have given my honest review.
Pub Date 09 Nov 2022

Lavie Tidhar has been one of my favorite authors since I read his Bookman Histories trilogy in the early 2010s. With an output that rivals Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lavie is one of my annual must-reads and I was thrilled to read Neom. Neom is a genre busting tale of robots, orphans, and treasure in the sprawling city of Neom in deserts of the Middle East. This book was one that I found infinitely surprising and I was caught off guard several times by the twists and turns Tidhar pulled off. The other thing that stood out in this book was the hope and optimism woven throughout. Tidhar has always been one of those authors that can write poignant and beautiful books and this one continues that streak. I will definitely be rereading this one for years to come.

I have no idea what this book was about.

I went into this so excited by the premise, the cover and the setting. And then it was all downhill from there.

Perhaps I have finally stumbled across a piece of scifi that has flown far over my head, perhaps it's just not my cup of tea. But I really didn't enjoy this.

The setting was the only good thing for me - this, like the author's other books, is set in a scifi-version of the middle east and I loved that. It's something I haven't seen in a book before and was so much fun.

But I could not find the plot of this for love nor money. It was a slow and very little happened. I don't understand where it was going - I do see that this is a scifi commentary on the status of human beings' ability, or lack thereof, to treat everyone equally. But ultimately this did not pack the punch I was hoping for.

So many characters, so many random POVs that aren't revisited. So little excitement. Alas.

After reading The Hood, his second brutal deconstruction of British myth, I expressed the hope that Tidhar might note that we had plenty of savagery already right now, thanks all the same, and give us something else along the same lines as the first book I read from him, and still my favourite, Central Station. A book which imagined the Middle East after the old enmities were finally in the past, the wars over, and the stars opened up to us. Not a utopia, by any means, but certainly a better world than the May 2016 in which I read it, let alone anything since. Well, helped no doubt by Tidhar's crazy productivity, here my wish comes true: not just a similar tone, but an outright sequel, albeit to the world more than any of the individuals through whom we encountered it*. The title is taken from a Saudi techno-city which at present is barely off the drawing board, but which here has the lived-in quality of a classic Star Wars set, and the narrative loosely follows events there and in the sands between it and Central Station. There's a map this time, hinting at many other stories to be told in the region (and of course it has a warning of worms, because is it even a science fiction desert if there aren't giant worms?). And if anything, the world feels a few steps further from utopia than before; the wars may be in the past, at least for the humans, but the slow-motion explosion in which one lead's family are trapped feels like all too apt a metaphor for the modern Middle East; the Saudi morality police's writ may not run in Neom, but there is still a Saudi morality police. There's still a gig economy, too, though somehow it reads as a little more humane than ours, and serves largely to make another of the leads reassuringly, half-comically ubiquitous. Although the mentions of old Soviet space colonisation technologies offer a depressing hint that even this limited progress may only be believable because it stems from another timeline than our own blighted one. The various strange and frequently dangerous legacies littering the wilderness, together with the often oblique angle to them, reminded me of the earlier stages of Cordwainer Smith's future history, before the Instrumentality is quite established, and the old robot who is one of the story's drivers has definite echoes of Simak, though Simak's seldom had quite such dubious pasts; for me, these are among the best points of reference SF can have. An afterword confirms that the former nod at least is deliberate. For a while, as the finale ramped up, I feared that there might be a little too much plot happening, but mercifully that bullet is dodged and the novel concludes as it began, a mood piece from a world of wonders, written to find out why a robot might be carrying a single rose.

*Looking up references after the mention here of "'Mad' Rucker, who seeded the Boppers on Titan", turns out there are other Tidhar stories set in this world too, or at least close enough to overhear, and the afterword confirmed a few others I've read as parts of the same old-style future history.

(Netgalley ARC)

A dreamlike fable of a degenerate future.Reminiscent of Dhalgren or Winterlong. I feel the loss of Elias more acutely than I should, but that can be attributed to the genius of the writer.

I'm not sure if I'd have had an even better experience with Neom if I'd read Central Station first - but I enjoyed this all the same (and now want to read more of Tidhar's works). This short, at times slow and meandering, novel conceals some big ideas. It focuses on the small picture, really zooming in on its many characters, so the reader is sometimes unaware of where the story's going. Although slightly uneven in its pacing, I was fascinated - I could read a whole other series about some of the characters, they were so intriguing. I particularly loved the boy and the jackal. The world-building was a true strength of this book, despite the character emphasis.
3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

I received a free copy of this book and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

This book was definitely weird, but that’s not a bad thing. I found myself lost at times, but I think that’s because I haven’t read ‘Central Station’ and this was my first exposure to what seems to be a complex and detailed world.
Things I liked:
1) The setting. It takes place in the future Middle East, which is fascinating.
2) The world building. It seemed to be very layered, like there were many stories to be told.
3) The writing. The writing was lovely with some very nice imagery.
Things I didn’t like:
1) I don’t think this is really a standalone book. There were places where I was really confused about what was going on, although, again, I think that’s because I haven’t read ‘Central Station.’
2) The pacing. It started very slow, and then everything seemed to happen in the last fifty pages.
3) Robot Jesus? I don’t know what else to call it but that was just a little cheesy.

As a whole I liked this book. I’d like to read ‘Central Station’ and see if things made a little more sense, though…

In Neom, Tidhar returns to the world of the Central Station spaceport outside Tel Aviv, but this time concentrating on the hinterlands along the Red Sea where a new city on the Arabian peninsula was created. A robot leftover from the last war wanders into town and visits a woman in a flowershop, digs up a man of gold, and enjoys (sort of) a strawberry milkshake in a malt shop. The plot doesn’t get much more dense than that, not even when a wandering boy and a jackal wander into town. Think poetic visions rather than galloping around the plot track. Life, the Universe, and Everything in a damn nutshell.