Customer Reviews

Stations of the Tide

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3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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 atmosphere could best be described as Sci-fi Southern Gothic, like William Faulkner remixed by William Gibson. The bureaucrat doggedly slogs through this milieu, encountering smugglers of alien artifacts, looters, shamans, a family straight out of a V.C. Andrews novel, and possibly a shapechanging alien.

Despite its charms and fascinations, the novel isn't fully emotionally engaging for a lot of its length, and much of this has to do with the rather unsympathetic nature of the main character. The bureaucrat seems to be everything his title would imply: a colorless, charmless, unimaginative automaton, meticulous in the performance of his job and utterly inattentive to everything else. Even his talking briefcase has more personality than him, and his detached blandness makes the starkest possible contrast to the fascinating and intricate world he moves through. Nobody cares about the bureaucrat's mission but the bureaucrat, and despite his dutiful, passionless persistence he seems ever more unequal to his task: the local authorities will not cooperate with him, everyone he talks to lies to him and stonewalls him simply out of spite, he is armed with apparently no knowledge of the world or its customs and culture, and Gregorian's followers are fanatical, ruthless, and seemingly know his every move even before he does.

But this is science fiction, and science fiction is about overturning expectations. Nothing in this book is what it seems; not the central conflict, not the bureaucrat, and least of all the plot, which is about as "meandering" as a Swiss watch. The chief pleasure of the novel, aside from Swanwick's prose, lies in seeing a million utterly disparate threads skillfully drawn together before our eyes and woven into something much greater than the sum of its parts, something not only intellectually engaging but emotionally powerful: we know the bureaucrat at the end, and against all odds we care for him, and his fate moves us. So many SF novels peter out in the final act, but the last fifty pages of STATIONS OF THE TIDE are among the most intensely satisfying I've ever read. We leave the book with a feeling of profound contentment and toe-tapping joy, as if we've satiated a need so deep-seated that we were heretofore unaware of its existence. It's one of the best reading experiences I've had in a long, long time; it's one of those books that burns to be shared with everyone you know.

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.

Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide was like a breath of fresh wind into the science fiction field. And as refreshing as it was for SF readers, it was probably even more important to the SFWA, the organization that awards the Nebula, as after awarding the Nebula for four straight years to bombs they were able to retain some credibility, got their act together finally, and awarded a true deserving science fiction novel.

The novel is `only' 250 pages or so, relatively short in this era of 700 page doorstops. But there's an entire fascinating universe contained within these pages. Swanwick's writing is succinct; many concepts in few words. The first three pages of the novel are important to set up not just the setting, but the author's style of writing and it pays-off the reader by taking time to understand it. When the protagonist is talking to his boss, who or what and how is he talking to him. How does his boss after the conversation `return' to the corner and shut off? When you understand that the `surrogate' is an advanced form of telecommunication, you appreciate not just the set up of the plot but the level of technology in this novel.

Swanwick's characterization is superb and his characters, whew, can be from off the beaten path. When the protagonist meets one, the description of the character when he's sucking on some candy of some sort and `liquidly' moves it around in his mouth drives a mental picture of this character from memories of others that had done the same, I just never have read anyone that just even attempted to describe it. Also when the protagonist meets the mother of Gregorian, the person he's searching for, she's this obese women that barely can move, you can picture her and imagine her as someone you've read about in the news that was so heavy and never moved that when she died in front of the tv, they had to cut her away from the couch upholstery which became embedded in her skin. And this woman's arrogance on her past beauty when she's way, way past that time but still acts like it when all that's left are some photos of her from years ago that she shows off reminds one so clearly of other people one has met in real life.

The planet, Miranda, that the protagonist, the bureaucrat, is on, as he searches for Gregorian, the antagonist who is believed to have stolen some piece of forbidden technology, is in the last few days before being flooded in one of the periodic planetary effects. Planetary celebrations are ongoing and you can feel the buzz in the air, like Mardi Gras before an impending thunderstorm (this meant in a positive way). And labeling the bureaucrat as competent is severely understating his abilities and the events he goes through. He is of course human. He meets this `witch' who embellishes his life, teaches him forms of tantric sex (which, um, I've tried and actually does work) and falls for the woman, but to her he is emotionally meaningless. The scenes are heartwrenching when he occasional sits down and cries over her, but eventually gets up and continues his quest, because afterall it's his job and his responsibility.

It is a confrontation between magic and science. Magic is such a subtheme, and the occurring events are so unorthodox, that towards the end when the protagonist is trekking on a path to a final confrontation with Gregorian, you're blindsided by the reality of when (paraphrasing): `white objects, measuring a few millimeters in diameter, began dropping from the sky', because at this point you don't know if it's manna from heaven, pieces of paper, or a swarm of living entities. Like a short story, the novel is not concluded until the very end. It is a triumph for science. For those whose careers are in the field of science, this ending is a reminder of all the reasons one entered the field; that it's not a religion, it's the hope and power and promise of science.

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!

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.

IMHO, this is one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're tired of the media tie-in crap that passes for imaginative literature, pick this up immediately. There's more invention here than in a hundred Star Treks.

This is one of the few books (out of the many SF/F I have read) I'd still give a ten, years after I've read them.

This is not just a beautifully written story, it has that certain kind of touching deepness about it, the kind that makes it stay with you and that makes you understand the world around yourself just a little bit better. Well, to me at least.
It reminds me a bit of a far future fairy tale, if there were such a thing. Something the family elders could tell the younger ones, sitting around the (no doubt electric) fireplace, for their enjoyment and benefit.

It's a story about what magic is about, basically, though it's about the exercise of power, transformations, talking briefcases and a lot of other things, too. And all this in just 250 (not even small-printed) pages! Not a word wasted, there.
The story is very cleverly constructed (pay attention to how a soap opera watched by our protagonist reflects the events in the main story line), packed with beautiful images (like the fungus rain, building fleeting beauty) and interesting ideas (e.g. the hidden fortress, a clever use of technology to explain believably a plot device known otherwise just from fairy tales).

I liked "Stations..." for some of the same reasons I liked "The Book of the New Sun", so if you like that one, you just might enjoy this one, too. BTW, Stations of the Tide is set in the same universe as "Griffon's Egg" and "Vacuum Flowers", only much later. If you know "Vacuum Flowers", you will catch a cross-reference or two, although that knowledge is not required to enjoy this book.

Well, this one is soooo beautiful, I think I have to quit rambling and go home and just read it again...

Nice to see the book reprinted - it certainly deserves a wider audience than it enjoys now. Swanwick's surreal novel is fast-paced and intelligent, with engaging characters and sometimes way-out-weird situations, alternately delighting and shocking. To describe the plot would be to do the book injustice - it is much more than a mere search by a faceless beauracrat for a renegade wizard. The book grabs you right from the first word, and drags you breathless and amazed up to the surprising ending. I think it's indicative of Swanwick's brilliance that my favourite character is the AI briefcase!

In one tiny little volume, Swanwick takes on technology, alien races, witches, oceans, and the nature of time. The bureaucrat goes after the wizard/criminal and nothing at all is what it seems.

I tend to agree with the reviewer who found the characters to be a little too allegorical, and that did (for me) hurt the overall quality of the book. I felt somehow that the characters needed more weight to carry so much material, and I was ultimately unconvinced by the bureaucrat's final changes as a result.

Still, more creativity than most writers hope to attain...