Mama Jones looked after the boy because there was no one else and the rule across this country was the same in whichever enclave of it you were. Here, in between, there were still those people of the land they had called variously Palestine or Israel and whose ancestors had come there as labourers from around the world, from the islands of the Philippines, and from the Sudan, from Nigeria, and from Thailand or China, whose children were born there, and their children’s children, speaking Hebrew and Arabic and Asteroid Pidgin, that near-universal language of space. In North Tel Aviv the Jews lived in their skyrises, and in Jaffa to the South the Arabs had reclaimed their old land by the sea.

Early on, we meet Miriam ‘Mama’ Jones, proprietor of a vaguely disreputable tavern and adoptive mother of Kranki, one of many children in Central Station whom everyone believes are more than human in ways yet unknown:

There is no preaching and no tweeness, no corner-rounding or lecturing Central Station is anti-didactic in every way, and this is what enables its success. This is one of the ways, I think, in which Tidhar avoids many of the traps into which any work with this environment as its setting may have fell. That is, what seems to our current divided world an almost impossible resolution is given a treatment as grimy, lived-in and imperfect as any other modern SF setting might turn out to be. Here lies the first of the book’s withholdings: we never learn how this utopian end was reached, except insofar as we come to see it is anything but. Tidhar’s titular spaceport is on the site of modern-day Tel Aviv, and finds itself in the heart of a land both non-nation and joint Jewish-Palestinian cohabitation. In the gaps of these careful overlappings, you understand, is the work’s singularity. This is the anthology as mosaic, the collection as gauzed screen.

Here is a linked series of short stories, ones published in many cases years apart and miles away, rethreaded with additions and dilations into not so much a whole as a tesselation. I say this without having yet completed the shortlist but the notion that a work as important or lyrical or entertaining has been published in the last five benighted years of science fiction seems unlikely, much less that by chance two, like iridescent buses, have come along at once. Let us cease this charade: Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station must win the Arthur C Clarke Award of 2017.

Seven Vampires by Lavie Tidhar