Written by Arthur Liu
Genre: Cyberpunk, Near Future
When I dived into the world of Central Station for the first time, I had just left the Wudaokou Area in Haidian District, Peking, which bears the nickname “Center of the Universe”. The scenery within the book resonated with what I had witnessed there in a very interesting way.
Unlike Central Station, Wudaokou is not the traffic core linking the Earth and the space, yet it is still a gathering place for high technology companies. Life here is extraordinarily colorful. Standing near the crossroads where Chengfu Road and Zhongguancun East Street meet, you will see salary men and salary women hurrying up and down the streets, passing those retired locals. You will notice the policemen directing traffic, while takeaway deliverers storming through the sidewalks under their noses, just to earn a living. Street cleaners, foreigners with different colors, shared-bike recyclers riding on three-wheelers……My first impression of Wudaokou, even Beijing, is that it is a mixture of identities. Here, universities, research institutes and business skyscrapers stand among malls, restaurants, as well as stands selling milk tea, fried chicken and underwear.
What Central Station reminds me of is exactly this feeling, which directs me to focus on its depictions of living space and culture within a metropolis. Growing up in a collective community in Israel, Lavie Tidhar seamlessly blends the native traditions of Tel Aviv in real life with cyberized imaginations, thus creating a polyphonic, intriguing world setting. In the novel, cyberpunk is not just a mere patchwork of electric symbols, but a poetic guidance that leads readers through its overwhelming utopia.
The settings of Central Station are intriguing indeed. The novel sets its background in a terminal station in the age of space exploration. This station located in Tel Aviv is a proud product of advanced technologies surrounded by countless civilians, framing a typical “High Tech, Low Life” vibe. There are four types of beings gathering in the area: normal people, cyborgs with brain interfaces, robots and digital creatures, each bear their unique understanding of the world. Upon such backgrounds, the tales that loosely constructs the backbone of the novel are filled with dazzling future technologies. It even depicts artists that manufacture virtual gods on celebration rituals, as well as vampires that feed on brain data.
However, judging from my reading experience, these technologies should not be seen simply as a pure speculation of our future-tech, or an alienation of Israeli traditions, but also an inspiring insight into global multiculturism.
To understand this insight, I would like to bring your attention to Lavie Tidhar’s focus on people’s identities. There is a repeated emphasis on people’s social status in the narrative. As an explicit example, the title of a lot of chapters in this book is actually referencing to how the roles of specific characters are defined (The Lord of Discarded Things, Robotnik, The Oracle, The God Artists and Strigoi). These identities reflect two dimensions of diversity—ethnic diversity caused by interplanetary travel, and species diversity caused by physical & mental modifications.
By mixing these two kinds of diversities together, Lavie Tidhar created a bunch of hybrids, each bearing multiple cultural heritages. For example, the full name of main character Boris Aharon Zhong indicates that the space traveller has Russian, Chinese and Middle-East lineage. Putting millions of people just like Zhong together, we have a furnace that is far bigger and far more complex than any civilizations on Earth now. Gazing at this kind of cultural fusion, although it is impossible to identify any explicit Chinese, Israeli, Palestinian, Russian or American elements, it is easy for readers to verify the shadow casted upon the characters from these nationalities. Therefore, compared with The Windup Girl written by Paul Bacigalupi, Central Station goes a step further on depicting multi-ethnic communities.
Tangled at the core of these fusion is the aforementioned character Boris Aharon Zhong. As a prodigal, he bears too many tags: a robot technician with a native lover, a space wanderer whose name implies decent of three countries……These marks enabled him to interact with people from different social classes around the station, even with those in power. In this sense, he is both the viewpoint character and the embodiment of the novel’s spirit. At the beginning of the novel, he returned to earth, hurried to Central Station where he was born out of a nostalgic rush. He hoped to find the answer to his questions there, and in the end, he leads us readers to understand his concerns, which is a question to self-identities, to the meaning of individual existence. Staying around the station, Boris’s confusion was given a broader value: In such a colorful world, it was not only his own problem, but also a problem that haunted everyone who was raised up there. The question is: Living in such a world, who am I when facing a future with so many choices and a past with such complicated and heavy heritages? Who will I choose to become? To answer the question, they have to battle with their history, fighting a way of their own.
The paths to answer the question for people with different identities make up the whole novel, meaning that the author’s prior attention is not the traditional utopia-dystopia duet of similar world-building. It is obvious that Lavie Tidhar is not concerned about why people without brain interfaces are seen as the disabled, nor was he interested in how the new era should deal with information addicts. There is no conflict built upon social order. On the contrary, the author is concerned about individuals, about the way they live as unique and vivid beings. This sense of post-modernism resonates well with our world, where it is getting harder and harder to locate revolutionary narratives within a mindset of oppression-rebellion cliché. Instead, there are millions, even billions of voices thundering around the globe, eager for echoes. In a world like this, to act like Boris, driving away from the metropolis into the wild, making a voice for oneself, may just be the weapon that the generic public use to fight against the world.
This is why this novel matters. It exploited the variety of identities to construct a dazzling near-future city, and captured people’s deepest concern in such a multi-cultured world. Just like Little, Big by John Crowley, the author used his hymn-like tongue to invite readers to his little and big world. Out of his Israeli traditions and travel experiences, Lavie Tidhar gave birth to a fable of our future. It is not only a future of Israel, not only a future of Yiwu, which inspired the author to write the novel, not only a future of Wudaokou, but also a future of multiculturism, a future that everyone nowadays is destined to face.