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Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick — book cover

Stations of the Tide

by Michael Swanwick
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Overview

From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.

The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers.

A man from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies has been sent to investigate. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and charismatic bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting, dying world in his own evil image—and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying and astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.

This novel of surreal hard SF was compared to the fiction of Gene Wolfe when it was first published, and the author has gone on in the two decades since to become recognized as one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers.

Synopsis

From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes a masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.

The Jubilee Tides will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers.

A man from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies has been sent to investigate. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and charismatic bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting, dying world in his own evil image—and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying and astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.

This novel of surreal hard SF was compared to the fiction of Gene Wolfe when it was first published, and the author has gone on in the two decades since to become recognized as one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers.

David Zindell

This is in all ways a magical book. It is wonderfully inventive, exotic yet hauntingly familiar, important, funny, intelligent and visionary. Michael Swanwick is a true seer, in the best sense of that word: he sees the marvelous and terrifying reality that underlays the world of Ocean (and our own world as well), and he opens our eyes to a new way of seeing it.

About the Author, Michael Swanwick

Michael Swanwick lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has won five Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award.

Reviews

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Editorials

San Francisco Chronicle

Stations of the Tide is a heady mix of wild ideas and images, mean and tender, exciting and scary.

Washington Post World

Stations of the Tide combines technological wizardry, exotic ecosystems and a journey across the face of a drowning world in a novel of great ingenuity and panache...a deeply engaging novel, which throws off enough pyrotechnics to fuel trilogies by lesser writer and ends in a deft turn of incident that is both unexpected and carefully prepared'on an apt and lovely note of closure.

New York Times Book Review

Playful, erotic and disturbing...Mr. Swanwick challenges the routine ways we divide up the world. He pursues elusive truths that resist pigeonholing.

Houston Post

Swanwick spins a solid tale and even manages a truly transcendent finale, but it is his well-defined water world setting that makes the novel unusually effective. His picture of a civilization chaotically embracing its liquid rite of death and renewal perfectly sets the stage for the ultimate bureaucrat/mystic confrontation that resolves the story.

William Gibson

A sinuous narrative, worldly and very agreeably perverse.

David Zindell

This is in all ways a magical book. It is wonderfully inventive, exotic yet hauntingly familiar, important, funny, intelligent and visionary. Michael Swanwick is a true seer, in the best sense of that word: he sees the marvelous and terrifying reality that underlays the world of Ocean (and our own world as well), and he opens our eyes to a new way of seeing it.

Pat Cadigan

An expert orchestration of bizarrely beautiful images, aliens, and humans in haunting story of changes and magic. Stations of the Tide proves that science fiction can be intelligent, literate, and compelling-high-quality entertainment, sure to be one of the top books of the year.

Publishers Weekly

Swanwick ( Vacuum Flowers ) takes a fascinating mix of nanotechnology, magic, the vagaries of human nature (including the dynamics of office politics, transmitted to a higher plane) and an accidental genocide, and creates a futuristic detective novel with believable, motivated characters and a tight and exciting plot. Employees of the Division of Technology Transfer live in space and conduct their business through electronic doppelganger. These meet in the agreed-upon dataspace called the Puzzle Palace and work to restrict the level of planetside high technology. The unnamed protagonist (he is called ``the bureaucrat'') is assigned to travel in person (rather than via mental communication) to the planet Miranda in order to track down an ex-employee of the division named Gregorian, who has set himself up as a bush wizard in the Tidewater region, currently in chaos because of the approaching date of its once-a-century flooding. In an atmosphere of urgency and tension, the bureaucrat/agent must discover whether Gregorian is using proscribed high-tech for his magic, and if he is willing to kill to keep it. Swanwick's fluid prose is enriched by symbolism that add to the maturity of this highly readable work. Science Fiction Book Club featured alternate. (Feb.)

Library Journal

As the planet Miranda slowly drowns under the weight of its own tides, a bureaucrat from the Division of Technology Transfer conducts an investigation into the life of a local celebrity, a ``magician'' who possesses proscribed technology and whose personal powers hold much of the dying planet in thrall. Swanwick ( Vacuum Flowers, LJ 2/15/87) demonstrates his mastery of understated drama in a novel that brings a surrealistic approach to ``hard'' sf. Recommended for medium to large libraries.

Book Details

Published
February 1, 2011
Publisher
Doherty, Tom Associates, LLC
Pages
256
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780765327918

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