Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick ISBN: 0-380-73045-6 Publisher: Eos (HarperCollins) Pub. Date: 01 September, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.05 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Fascinating, canny, and powerful
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: It didn't win the nebula for nothing!!!
Comment: Wow! Any book who's coolest character is a briefcase seriously needs checking out! This is the book that earned Michael Swanwick all the praise that the science fiction community so lavishly distinguishes him with.
The book takes place in the distant future of the world he created in "Vacuum Flowers" but you don't have to read that book at all. It is a totally different story. (In fact I read this one first, a really cool combination). The book follows the 'bureaucrat' as he searches the doomed oceanic world of Miranda for a wizardlike scientist by the name of Gregorian, who has stolen "unperscribed" technology. Sounds confusing? Boring? WRONG! This book is nothing at all like what it seems. Halfway through the book you are still trying to guess what it's REALLY about, but not in a yawning type way like a lot of current science fiction. The book is jammed packed with some of the coolest ideas, innovations, and cut dialogue scenes that I have ever read.
Still, like any Swanwick novel, (except maybe "In the Drift") this is a very complex read. If you couldn't get five pages into Moby Dick, or don't even KNOW who Beowolf is, you may not like this novel at all. In fact, it could give you a migraine the size of Wisconsin just trying to figure out what the paragraph you JUST READ said! It is a pretty tough read, but that's another thing that makes this book great. Swanwick doesn't spend three pages explaining each totally foreign and new piece of technology, he just throws it out there on the page and you're forced to think, "What? How could the entire planet of Earth have it's own surrogate?!!" or better yet "Did his BRIEFCASE just beat the crap out of the people who stole it and then walk back to him??!!" GREAT STUFF!!!
Rating: 5
Summary: Most wonderous
Comment: Here you have a far-future tale which doesn't use Wolfe/Vance medievilism nor shiny hard-SF like A. Reynolds. Instead it relies on a personal vision of its author which is very convincing.
 |
Title: The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer ISBN: 0061053104 Publisher: Eos Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
 |
Title: The Falling Woman by Pat Murphy ISBN: 0312854064 Publisher: Orb Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1993 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
 |
Title: Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick ISBN: 0441858767 Publisher: Ace Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
 |
Title: Jack Faust by Michael Swanwick ISBN: 0380974444 Publisher: Avon Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1997 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
 |
Title: Moving Mars by Greg Bear ISBN: 0812524802 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1994 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
