The Conversation was there, and I began to discover that even as I was writing seemingly stand-alone SF stories, they would start to join up with the others into the early, mist-covered past of what was destined to become a future history.

By the end of 2010 I had moved back to Israel for a time and Central Station began to take hold of me. The next few years were dominated by that tale as I moved again, back to London this time, and improbably began a full-time writing career that is somehow still going.

I don’t remember when the last word of Central Station was finally written—some time in 2015, I think—but it led me to a small crisis of faith. I had nothing more to add to this world, I thought.

And that might have been it. . . .

Only, after a couple more years, it turned out I did want to go back and visit.

By 2018 I returned to Titan. In a series of new stories I went to visit Venus, Mars, the Gobi Desert, and Yiwu, and even went back to the Digitally Federated Lands of Judea Palestina.

Everything was going well. . . .

And then one year the world suddenly stopped.

Airplanes ceased overhead and traffic came to a halt and nature reclaimed the streets and children walked free on the roads. The hidden creatures in the nooks of the world began to re-emerge into spaces from which they’d been banished.

The planet, for just one precious moment, held its breath before some great exhale.

In the middle of that turbulence or lack thereof as we all waited, for life to start or end or to return, I went to Neom.

In truth, I wasn’t sure what I was doing. A robot came to the famed flower souq of Neom to buy a flower. It went into the desert. But I didn’t know why. I wrote another section to find out. By then the robot had dug a hole out in the sand. Again, I didn’t know—why?

I wrote another section to find out, then another. And realised I’d been writing the chapters of a novel all this time.

So, Neom. It’s not far from Central Station. You can catch a flight there, then go up to Gateway high in orbit, travel to Tereshkova Port in the clouds above Venus or to Lunar Port on the moon or take the trip to Tong Yun City on Mars and see the Robo-Pope. . . . Or you could go farther, to the Galilean Republics of Io and Ganymede, where the Trifala King War still rages as a low-level, ongoing conflict. Or farther still, to Titan, to visit Nirrti and the Boppers.

Beyond this only the Exodus ships go.