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timinbc's review against another edition
2.0
Well, he's consistent. I couldn't finish Tidhar's "Camera Obscura" either.
One reviewer said, "it reminds me of Hannu Rajaniemi" and there's another author I couldn't finish.
I'm told these started as short stories but were meant to be together. But I suspect I might have enjoyed them more as shorts, spread over time.
In my SF/F world, the author provides a setting, places characters in it, and either (a) sits back and watches what must inevitably happen, or (b) does mean things to the characters.
Tidhar started with a good setting, and some interesting enough characters. But not much had happened when I started to get restless. Did he add action or plot? No, he brought in another character, a data vampire. As I choked on that, enter stage left the ethereal godlings. You want plot? OK, let's have various characters fall in love with each other Even Though Society Frowns.
It's as if the author's brain is seething with ideas, but not one of them got filtered out of the end product so he could actually Tell Me A Story. Again, you can DO that in a short story but for me you can't do it in a novel.
I gave up on Camera Obscura when one of the characters rolled in with a Gatling gun where one of his arms used to be. Next up: a guy whose navel leads to another universe! Feh.
The whole thing reminded me of a great moment from "Pinky and the Brain" where Brain says, "Great idea, Pinky! No ... wait ... what if we wanted an idea that would WORK?"
One reviewer said, "it reminds me of Hannu Rajaniemi" and there's another author I couldn't finish.
I'm told these started as short stories but were meant to be together. But I suspect I might have enjoyed them more as shorts, spread over time.
In my SF/F world, the author provides a setting, places characters in it, and either (a) sits back and watches what must inevitably happen, or (b) does mean things to the characters.
Tidhar started with a good setting, and some interesting enough characters. But not much had happened when I started to get restless. Did he add action or plot? No, he brought in another character, a data vampire. As I choked on that, enter stage left the ethereal godlings. You want plot? OK, let's have various characters fall in love with each other Even Though Society Frowns.
It's as if the author's brain is seething with ideas, but not one of them got filtered out of the end product so he could actually Tell Me A Story. Again, you can DO that in a short story but for me you can't do it in a novel.
I gave up on Camera Obscura when one of the characters rolled in with a Gatling gun where one of his arms used to be. Next up: a guy whose navel leads to another universe! Feh.
The whole thing reminded me of a great moment from "Pinky and the Brain" where Brain says, "Great idea, Pinky! No ... wait ... what if we wanted an idea that would WORK?"
bee26's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.75
mdpenguin's review against another edition
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
I didn't realize that this was a collection of short stories, so at first I was having a hard time getting into it because the expected central plot never materialized. Once I figured it out, though, I liked it a lot. The stories do work incredibly well together and do build into a strong portrait of several people tied together and the city/world they live in. It also tied into a few other of Tidhar's books that I've read in a way that wasn't overbearing but made it feel a little more familiar and connected. Overall, it read like a cross between Philip K. Dick and Bruno Schulz, with writing better than the former but not to the level of the latter. Like Dick we got a gritty but functional world, with hints of unreality and a focus on the outcasts. Like Schulz we got a rather surreal world painted for us from the perspective of a series of family-oriented stories. Overall, I really liked it and might pick it up again sometime later to give the first few stories the attention they deserve.
lkrivitz's review against another edition
3.0
Beautiful prose and great cyberpunk setting, but the characters did not really engage my interest. May be due to the fact that this was a bunch of short stories reworked into a novel.
yuyine's review against another edition
3.25
Central station est un roman où le personnage principal, la ville elle-même, se dessine à travers 13 récits liés mais indépendants à la fois qui dessinent la fresque de ce lieu, de sa vie multiculturelle, de son histoire mais aussi de l’univers immense où elle s’inscrit. Foisonnant, palpitant et vertigineux, le récit manquait malheureusement pour moi d’un fil rouge plus solide où d’une émotion plus forte pour ne pas me laisser de côté. Je vous conseille cependant sa lecture mais seulement si votre fatigue n’est pas trop intense car il nécessite de s’accrocher un peu.
Critique complète sur yuyine.be (https://yuyine.be/review/book/central-station)!
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ohclaire's review against another edition
4.0
I really like the structure of this novel! It reads more like a short story collection, but the througharc is the world
erinflight's review against another edition
4.0
This is a strange, dreamlike story about a sci-fi future populated by decaying robots, machine-human minds, information vampires, and mechanical gods humans created for themselves.
The chapters skip around, both in time and space, with different narrators. I had trouble keeping track of the names, so I think I missed some of the connections between the different narratives. But, either way, they mostly don't tie together directly, and a lot of the threads don't really ever form complete stories.
This isn't a plot driven book. It's more of a collection of moments and individual people's stories, in a bittersweet version of the future.
I liked it, I'm not sure I followed it particularly well.
None of the individual ideas within the book struck me as particularly original (which is true of the majority of sci-fi), but the combination felt genuinely fresh for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.
The chapters skip around, both in time and space, with different narrators. I had trouble keeping track of the names, so I think I missed some of the connections between the different narratives. But, either way, they mostly don't tie together directly, and a lot of the threads don't really ever form complete stories.
This isn't a plot driven book. It's more of a collection of moments and individual people's stories, in a bittersweet version of the future.
I liked it, I'm not sure I followed it particularly well.
None of the individual ideas within the book struck me as particularly original (which is true of the majority of sci-fi), but the combination felt genuinely fresh for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.