The novel “Central Station” by Lavie Tidhar was published for the first time in 2016 fixing-up a number of short stories published in previous years. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Speculative Fiction, and the Israeli Geffen Award for Best Science Fiction novel.

Central Station is a space base that, in Tel Aviv, connects the Earth to the rest of the universe, where humanity spread over the centuries. The population of the area has increased so much that it’s become a sort of city within the city and is a crossroad of people coming and going inluding humans, cyborgs, robot priests, artificial intelligences and more connected to the aliens known only as the Others in a digital consciousness called the Conversation.

Boris Chong returns to Earth from Mars and discovers that a lot has changed and not for the better due to a chaotic growth. His ex-lover adopted a child with out of normal skills and some developments for his Earth relatives aren’t all positive. As if there weren’t enough problems, a data-vampire arrived from Mars too.