Stations of the Tide

So let's see; I waited entirely too long between finishing this and writing it up, but we'll give it a try. It's the future, and something very odd has happened to Earth, presumably due to runaway technology. Humanity has spread to other planets, and a bureaucracy with institutions named things like The Stone House and The Puzzle Palace has a division called Technology Transfer that tries to keep this, whatever it was, from happening to the rest of humanity. On the outskirts of the solar system, humans have carefully-controlled contact with Earth, in the form of a huge enigmatic Sphinx. After talking to Earth, you have to let the bureaucracy examine your memories and expunge anything they find disturbing there. In this context, a bureaucrat comes to one human world, one which has tragically abused technology in the past and so has had even more of it than usual taken away, in search of someone who (probably, or perhaps) has smuggled in something forbidden and is abusing it. The world is a strange and rich one, and it's about to undergo a phase-change, in which the seas rise to engulf nearly all the land, and all the life on the planet transforms into watery alternate forms, or dies. There are wild last parties, cities being hastily disassembled, lost fortresses slowly sinking under the water, enchantresses and wizards and demons who may be technology-enhanced, or hallucinations, or only rumors. (There's also some nice memorable sex.) So anyway, the bureaucrat moves through this world on this mission, assisted by his high-tech talking and transforming briefcase, and various odd and interesting things happen. Eventually he encounters the person he was searching for (more or less), and finds out just what is really going on (more or less). And he and the briefcase both undergo transformations of their own. It's a good book, a memorable book, a book with fascinating images and ideas, where technology blurs into deity and myth, and I can't recall a single nit to pick. You should read it.

This is a truly bizarre and haunting book, and one of my all-time favorite SF novels. A nameless bureaucrat (accompanied by his sentient briefcase) is sent to a backwater planet whose decaying human civilization is about to be obliterated by a cataclysmic, millenial flood. The bureaucrat is hunting a self-proclaimed mage named Gregorian, who claims he can transform the human colonists so they can survive the coming flood, and who is accused of stealing and using proscribed technology. The plot is basically the story of the bureaucrat's frustrating search for Gregorian, which leads him on a meandering journey across the planet Miranda during its last days of human habitation. What propells the book forward isn't the momentum of the plot, but the exploration of this doomed society, where technology is both so powerful and so inaccessible (it's hoarded by the off-world agency that the bureaucrat works for) that it's essentially the same as magic. One of the wonderful things about this book is the off-hand way in which this dazzling technology is described, as though the reader were an inhabitant of the bureaucrat's universe rather than our own, and therefore wouldn't need to have everything explained. This aspect of Swanwick's writing style can be confusing or frustrating, but by *not* spelling everything out, he creates an atmosphere of disorientation, of things kind of falling apart. This elusiveness also helps build a powerful feeling of mystery and wonder, where things are not as they seem on the surface, which is a major theme of the book. In trying to make sense of what's happening on Miranda, you follow in the footsteps of the main character. This book is a meditation on science and magic, decay and renewal, and office politics. Well, maybe it's not a meditation on office politics, but there's plenty of that in there, along with some breathtaking, incredibly imaginative images and ideas. The ending, in particular, is something special. I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

I finished reading STATIONS OF THE TIDE last week; I would have written about it sooner, but it's taken me this long to process and digest my thoughts about the book into something approaching a coherent whole.The book's plot feels like nothing so much as an SF take on Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS. Like that book, its protagonist is a nameless functionary (he is called simply "the bureaucrat" through the entire length of the novel) sent to a backwards hellhole (here, a decaying colony world) in search of a dangerous renegade. The world, called Miranda, has an erratic orbit that causes its ice caps to melt every couple of centuries and drown every inch of dry land; the native life has evolved to thrive under these conditions, but the human settlers have not. As the inept and corrupt local government tries to evacuate the populace in the last few weeks before the flood, the renegade - a man called Gregorian, who claims to be a wizard or magus - gains a following by offering to remake the Mirandans into amphibious creatures capable of surviving the deluge, for a price. The offworld authorities aren't sure if Gregorian is a simple fraud, murdering his followers for money, or if he's employing forbidden offworld technology; either way, he must be dealt with.The book is difficult to get into at first, and part of this is because Swanwick respects our intelligence enough to throw us into the deep end right from the beginning. As with Mamet's movie Spartan, rather than giving us exposition, he expects us to follow along and patiently assemble the facts of the story by picking them up in context. Once we get over not having everything spoonfed to us, the sense of discovery as the text progresses is intoxicating. The prose is finely-honed and cutting, getting to the truth of a scene in a few skillfully-chosen words. These two factors combine to keep the book brief but dense - it clocks in at less than 250 pages but feels as packed with character, ideas, and incident as a book twice its size.Swanwick is a disciple of Gene Wolfe, and this is most evident in the way the book's plot takes (or at least seems to take) a backseat to the meandering travelogue of the world on display. And that's fine, because Miranda is a fascinating place: kept forcibly low-tech by the offworld authorities for reasons that are not immediately made clear, it is a planet of swamps and rotting manor houses and superstitious villagers, where travel is effected not by spaceship or hovercraft but by zeppelin, motorboat, or foot. The local religion is a strange blend of voodoo/tribal ritual with Aleister Crowley/Grant Morrison/Alan Moore-style sex-and-drug "magick", and secret brotherhoods of witches and shamans are more feared and more obeyed by the locals than the ineffectual planetary government - but as the planet's watery end approaches, the locals increasingly ignore all authority and give themselves over to either lawless violence or frenzied, nihilistic partying. The resulting atmo

SF has never lacked for ideas, which is why it's such a good genre to read, because of that constant inventiveness. However, unless you like to read the equivilent of a physics thesis parade, most readers want a little more "meat" to their books, if not in terms of plot, at least definitely in charactization and layers of meaning. This book has that in spades. I've read once that it was based on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" which having not read that play I can't confirm but I am slightly familiar with some aspects of the play and I'd say it's a good bet. Nothing like some literary allusions to kick a good SF novel off, right? But it gets better, because this novel is heavy on the symbolism and the thinking stuff, though it never gets in the way of the interesting world and culture that Swanwick has developed. In a nutshell, a bureaucrat without a name comes to the world of Miranda to search for a man who barely appears, but apparently can do wonderful things. Why is that? Because he stole something he shouldn't. From there the novel jackknives wonderfully, as Swanwick unravels line after line of evocative prose that eloquently brings to life this water logged and doomed world, in all its grime and grandeur. By far the best part of reading this book is meeting the at first apparently bumbling bureaucrat and then slowly realize that not everything is what it seems and the man isn't so clueless after all. This isn't a novel designed to be instantly pleasurable though those just going by the surface story will find much here to enjoy simply by watching the mechinations of what a lesser book could turn into a simple suspense thriller, instead there are passages to be read again, if only for the way the prose flows so brilliantly, or the levels of allergory that I'm pretty sure went over my head. The moving ending alone, which will guarenteed leave you thinking after you put the book down, is nearly worth the price of admission. A fast read (I finished it in like two hours, it's two hundred and fifty pages with not so small print) that never feels rushed or padded, but just the right length, if you're looking for SF with some brains that isn't totally geared toward cyberspace or relativity, this may be well worth your time.

_Stations of the Tide_ is, on the surface, a story about an intergalactic cop going forth to catch intergalactic criminal.Thankfully, it goes much deeper than that.Office politics, plantation society, magic, sex, and apocalypse all play primary roles in this compelling and challenging tale. The world on which the Bureaucrat (the unnamed protagonist) pursues Gregorian (the distant, subtly menacing, string-pulling antagonist) is in flux, preparing for the thousand-year flood that will immerse most of the land on the planet. The impending doom/rebirth of the world brings with it strange imagery: masquerade balls lit by furniture too heavy to move, or too cheap to bother with; a group of daughters watching their family fortunes crumble as their possessions become less and less able to finance the cost of moving them to safety, and the dying matriarch revels in their impending poverty; a fortress hidden, not by camouflage, but by centuries of studied neglect. The carnival atmosphere of the world in which the Bureaucrat gamely tries to find his quarry (for he knows he has been sent on a fool's errand) quickly turns sinister, and yet retains its lush, unearthly beauty.The action, for the most part, happens at a distance, the book being more about discovery and ideas than anything else. The denouement is truly stunning, and will leave the reader thinking about it for a long time.I highly recommend _Stations of the Tide_ to anyone tired with the usual science fiction. It is utterly magical, and totally unforgettable.