Thursday, December 22, 2022

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Neom by Lavie Tidhar

 


Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC Audiobook (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on November 9 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Neom is an odd book for me to read - it's a book set in the same world as Tidhar's acclaimed novel "Central Station", which featured humans, robots, cyber-beings, and other entities in a future Tel Aviv/near Tel Aviv city called Central Station, which connected Earth to various outposts in the stars. Tidhar's work has often interested me, especially his shorter fiction (and he has edited some really good anthologies of world science fiction), and yet I didn't particularly love Central Station, which was written essentially as a series of stories in the same setting and then combined through editing into a single novel....and I didn't find the combination really did anything for me. So there as a good chance that Neom, an explicit return to the Central Station world, although in Saudi Arabia (currently in real life the dream city of Saudi autocrats) rather than Central Station, would not work for me either.

But to my pleasant surprise, Neom works really well, despite sharing a lot of similarities with Central Station: once again this is a story with no overarching conflict, no real antagonist, and no major plot momentum or tension that relies instead on characters' stories and interactions coming together to showcase character development in very very different peoples. In Neom, this is mainly an old Robot, a veteran of wars on Earth and in Space who is trying to resurrect a lost part of his past that he mourns tragically for, a middle aged woman working multiple jobs in a class-stratified city of Neom, and a boy whose family was lost trying to scavenge in the deadly remains of a terror artist who is trying to escape the world which holds only tragedy for him and to find a way into space. The characters here are really well done, the vignettes are strong, and the stories of people trying to survive, to love, to find their ways past their pasts and into new futures come together really nicely - and the story is highly entertaining at times too in how it's told. All in all, I really liked Neom, despite it not really fitting into my normal reading.

Note: I read half of this in audiobook and the reader is very very good. Recommended as a book in that format, and it's only 5.5 hours at normal speed there to boot.


-----------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
In the future, Neom is the megacity promised by the rich of today....at least for the super rich.  But for the lower class people, people like Mariam, it's simply a place they can struggle to survive by working multiple jobs, taking pleasures in conversations with simplistic outdated AI machines, and trying to do the best for oneself and ones loved ones.  It's a place where the police-like Shurta are essentially pointless, only enforcing minor laws since there is no crime, and vandalism of old machines is of little interest to anyone...even if those machines are cared for by people like Mariam. 

But Neom is about to face an upheaval.  For out in the Desert, a boy named Elias looks for passage off world after his whole family was caught in the fatal still-going destruction caused by a long dead Terror Artist, and his passage will take him through Neom with his only possession of value - an artifact of the Terror Artist that promises potential destruction. And in Neom itself, a weary Robot who once waged war across land and space has decided to dig up an artifact from his past, which if restored could change everything.  

And for people like Mariam, for the Robot, for Elias, and the others who wind up in Neom, well who knows what upheaval will do to their futures?
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Neom is in some ways a book without a plot, like say Becky Chambers' Wayfarer books. That's where that comparison basically ends here, because Neom is not some idealized future, even as it largely takes place ostensibly in a city promoted by modern day Saudi Autocrats to be such a thing. Instead Neom is a story of characters striving to do things - whether that be Mariam working multiple small jobs that wind up putting her in the right place at the right time repeatedly, or Elias trying to escape the world to the Stars by hawking his one valuable possession to the right buyer and finding himself making friends with people he never expected, or the Robot trying to resurrect what it considers its greatest mistake by bringing the golden man artifact back to life - and what they encounter along the way. The world that each of these characters live in is not some idealized world, its one that is crappy in many ways like our own in its inequality and usage of those who are of lower class or of non-human species...but it's one these people can persevere to possibly find something for.

And Neom tells these stories beautifully, whether that be of the Robot (who probably gets the most time in page-length) and its quest, or of Mariam simply doing her jobs and encountering all these oddities...as well as encountering a man in Nasir who might actually be interested in giving her some company, or of Elias as he learns more about himself and the world...be that friendship, or the strangeness of other humans and creatures, or more. The setting remains utterly delightfully weird at times - Jackals with personality who can talk, strange hermits seemingly on the spectrum in the Desert who live on trade, abandoned spaceships, robots broken apart by war, terror artists creating art through mass destruction, etc. etc. But Tidhar infuses all of these oddball aspects of the setting with depth and life and with such great dialogue such that they're both delightful to read about and never feel like something artificial and weird just for the sake of being weird.

And unlike Central Station for me (and I think I'm a minority opinion here just to be clear), all of these stories come together marvelously in the end. It all fits really really well, and each of the major characters and most of the minor characters are just really delightful to read and learn about...even some like a Butterfly collecting robot weapons that have bit parts that make you smile in the end. There's no central conflict, but the stories all have a journey that brings them all together in Neom, and it is, I guess I can best put it, beautiful.

Highly recommended short read.

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