Neom by Lavie Tidhar

Published by Tachyon Publications on November 9, 2022

Can robots have religion? A robot messiah known as the Golden Man parts the Red Sea in Neom, a sea that is polluted by the remains of smart matter. Other robots, built for war, follow the Golden Man. But will they destroy the city of Neom in the same way they turned New Punt to dust centuries earlier?

Neom is an actual place. The brainchild of a Saudi prince, Neom is a smart city (it’s advertised as a “cognitive city”) north of the Red Sea and east of Egypt in northeastern Saudi Arabia. Neom is also a science fiction novel set in the distant future. Part of the novel takes place in Neom.

The future Neom is in the same location, but it is now “a mammoth metropolitan area.” The Central Station spaceport near Tel Aviv is a short flight from Neom. Central Station is the title of Lavie Tidhar’s 2017 novel that begins the future history he continues here.

The spaceport ties Neom to the inhabited solar system. Wars have been fought. Some of the detritus of war, including talking jackals and machines that are either sentient or pretending to be, roam the desert outside of Neom. They have nothing else to do.

Residents of Neom are either privileged by wealth or serving the privileged. Mariam grew up in Neom and never left. Like other poor people in Neom, she takes on all the work she can find. She cleans the homes of rich people. Hiring a human cleaner is a status symbol, a step up from using a general-purpose household robot.

Among her other jobs, Mariam sells flowers. She sells a rose to an old robot who becomes one of the novel’s central characters. The robot had a name at one point, but it refuses to share that name with humans. The robot was constructed as a humanoid war machine but was repurposed before it gained the freedom of obsolescence.

Tidhar works seamless backstories into the novel without disturbing its flow with obvious exposition. We learn about the robot’s travels to other worlds, its interaction with other robots, and its knowledge of war and terrorartists.

Mariam also works for Mukhtar’s Bazaar of Rare and Exotic Machines. Mukhtar sometimes makes business deals of questionable legality, but the law is loosely enforced in Neom. Nasir, a law enforcement officer in Neom, spends most of his time writing tickets for littering and admiring Mariam.

Saleh is a child who managed to escape when his father was frozen in time, forever dying in an explosion that was manufactured by a terrorartist using a time-dilation bomb, “the final installation of a mad artist who took delight in destruction and death.” Saleh and his father used a portable generator to protect themselves as they scavenged the site for artifacts. Something went wrong, leaving Saleh to fend for himself. Saleh joins a caravan and makes his way to Neom, where he interacts with Mukhtar and Mariam (and eventually with the robot) as he tries to raise money to book passage to Mars, where he hopes to begin a new life.

Much of the plot surrounds the old robot’s quest to restore to life the Golden Man. The Golden Man has a heart (power source) and something the robot regards as a soul. The nature of the soul and of the Golden Man is a bit ambiguous. These are mysteries the reader is meant to ponder. I was enchanted by the story and happily mystified by its unanswered questions.

Whether robots can have a soul depends on whether souls exist and, if so, what they are and whether they are confined to humans. When fighting robots have no war to fight, they are left to wonder about their purpose. What do they do when they are too old or outdated to serve humans? One became a toilet on a spacecraft for two centuries to better understand bodily function. Some formed a monastery so they could try to understand God, to divine a purpose for their continued existence.

All of this — and much more that I haven’t touched upon — is fascinating. It draws from familiar themes of science fiction without dwelling on them, then peppers the story with new and creative ideas. The novel is short but eventful, always in motion but not driven by action. Perhaps because of its emphasis on robots, but primarily because it is such a quiet novel, Neom reminded me of Clifford D. Simak’s groundbreaking science fiction. Just as Neom is a cognitive city, Neom is a cognitive novel — a story to think about and, in the end, to appreciate as an innovative work in a genre that is too often stagnant.

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