Stations of the Tide
★★★★★
An end-times mania grips the planet of Miranda as the jubilee tides are due to transform the world into an ocean for the next century, metamorphosing its fauna and flora into their water-based forms. Miranda is a liminal zone on a chaotic boundary between one state and the next; the water will wipe the world clean, and everything seems possible in a society riven with mysticism, debauchery, vice, and magic.
Prohibited Promethean technology, rumoured to grant the shapeshifting power of the ecosystem to Miranda’s human inhabitants, has been stolen. The Kafkaesque bureaucracy, which restricts advanced technologies, sends the bureaucrat – his depersonalised identity defined entirely by his job, the classic man in black with his sentient briefcase – to pursue his nemesis, the thief Gregorian, across a deconstructing landscape as the world parties.
We understand Gregorian through the stories he leaves behind, parables and proverbs relayed in intimate scenes by exotic and eccentric characters. The world of Miranda is built in slow time, not through exposition, but through the accretion of stories, drawing the bureaucrat in as he forms relationships and transgresses boundaries – his simple pursuit becomes a pilgrimage as the world gets under his skin, ultimately leading him to abandon everything.
Explicitly reimagining The Tempest, drawing on Gene Wolfe, and with a dash of Heart of Darkness, Stations of the Tide is firmly rooted in literary SF. While plot is secondary to the experience, Swanwick’s pace stalls as we linger in surreal drug-fuelled hallucinations and tantric sex, though ultimately he comes through with a perfect finale. For all its explicit influences, it reminded me most of Delany, paralleling Dhalgren in its sensory and sexual exploration of a surreal liminal zone. Many will be put off by its drugs, sex, and magical realism, but if you persevere and let the layered narrative build, this is one of the finest examples of sense-of-place in SF: a vibrant, living world caught in the moment of transformation.
