The scope of Lavie Tidhar's new novel Central Station may be galactic, but each of its many, many co-existing layers of reality are connected by one locale: the ever-present space port of Central Station, an unimaginably massive building that joins the human past on Earth to its rapidly evolving future. Trying to summarize Central Station is like trying to summarize an entire season of a soap opera, except there are no heroes or villains, and, you know, the plot's mysterious baby scandal is about who engineered him in the vat and to what purpose. Adding to the drama is the Conversation: an inescapable, interconnected network that touches (almost) all people throughout the space-time continuum.

Central Station grew out of 13 linked short stories, some previously published and some new, which is what grants World Fantasy Award-winning author Tidhar such a broad canvas. His interwoven mix of human and non-human lives is full of characters crashing into the world and sending out ripples like stones thrown into a pond.

Is the main thrust that prodigal son Boris Aharon Chong has returned to Central Station, with an alien parasite in tow, to face the family, woman, and otherworldly child he abandoned in different ways? (In the cast list at the back of the book, Boris Chong is described as having “issues”—an understatement.) Is the central plot the forbidden battlefield romance between Isobel Chow and a robotnik named Motl, a being that stopped being human as we understand it long ago? Is the story the machination of the Oracle, Ruth Cohen, and the rag-and-bone man Ibrahim, who are all joined with non-human, digital, sentient life forms called Others? What of techno-vampire Carmel and her romance with the least technologically capable human in the story, the node-less and thus data-less Achimwene Haile Selassie Jones? And what's up with the manufactured boys Kranki and Ismail anyway?

The Conversation gives Central Station its power. Tidhar imagines a humanity so fundamentally changed by networked technology that everyone gets a node connecting them to the Solar-System-spanning Conversation before they are even born. While most humans are in constant quasi-telepathic digital data exchange in the Conversation, some choose to become full cyborgs or completely immersed "conchs." Those unable to interact with the Conversation are considered "crippled." Some people upload themselves to the data stream after they die, while some bond with non-human Others, the inscrutable beings who live only digitally and were only nominally created by humans.

This wide range of lifestyles makes the story's possible future crunchy and real, because it acknowledges and develops the reality of a multicultural globe. Religions proliferate (including the Church of Robot and the no-philosophy philosophy of Ogko, whose own holy book says he does not exist), cultures mix, and new languages are born and have their own poetry. For a book that runs on the fundamental existence of technology and data, it's organic, alive, and messy—things often missing from far-future imaginings.

Your invitation to the organic riot

Tidhar's three previous novels garnered awards and praise for their use of pulp and genre elements in pursuit of political commentary, as well as their darker-than-black humor. In comparison, Central Station is much less focused, likely because of its mosaic format. Science fiction is no stranger to the mosaic novel, in which discrete short stories are linked together to form a larger narrative. Both the beloved Wild Cards series (started by George R.R. Martin) and Thieves World (created by Robert Asprin) contain mosaic novels in addition to their more standard short story collections. Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a sort of quasi-mosaic in which stories loosely intertwine without quite building into a well-defined, overarching narrative.

Mechanically, Tidhar's skill with prose adds to the organic riot. The world of the Central Station is vital with sound, smell, and color (with its mixture of the ancient and the speculatively new, Tel Aviv is the perfect address for Central Station). In just a few words, Tidhar can give every character and place a history. It would be nice, however, if he didn't leave so many of his well-crafted paragraphs hanging from ellipses or severed in their prime by em dashes.

Yet Central Station's weaknesses add up to strengths. The episodic nature of the chapters may feel unsatisfying and unfocused, and the way story-spanning plot strands can finish mid-book might leave a reader unbalanced. On the other hand, the escape from more traditional (and commercial) story structure allows the Central Station to be a place where the extraordinary and alien are commonplace, its world imbued with life beyond the service of a single narrative arc. Messiahs come and go and don't require a massive build-up and a crashing finale.

Characters live without rising and falling action, because life has never been a three-act narrative. The true main characters of the story, around whom the world revolves inscrutably—Central Station itself and the Conversation—are too expansive, new, and inhuman for traditional narratives to contain.