Stations of the Tide – Michael Swanwick (1991)
On the cover of my edition of this 1991 Nebula winner, the blurb from the New York Times Book Review reads, “Engrossing…enigmatic…playful, erotic, and disturbing.” I heartily agree with most of these adjectives. The one word missing, at least for me, is impenetrable. Like C. J. Cherryh, Swanwick throws the reader into his world assuming that they already know the way it’s structured and all its rules, and expects the reader to figure out any details he provides on their own. There’s no generous exposition here for most of the book, only a plot that skips along at a breakneck pace, keeping up with the protagonist the bureaucrat in his fevered search for the outlawed Gregorian, an apparent wizard of some sort.
On the planet Miranda a phenomenon known as the jubilee tides drowns the continents every so many years, sending her inhabitants fleeing. But this time Gregorian is promising that he can change human being so that they can live in the newly risen oceans. Whether this is magic or technology is never revealed, but it is unacceptable to the extraterrestrial ruling body the governs Miranda from afar, denying advanced technology to the Mirandan civilization. Hence why the bureaucrat, working for that government, is dispatched to find the wizard and hunt him down.
I’m not sure I have much to say about this book because it was so dense and experience for me. I feel neutral about it in terms of whether or not I liked it; someone to discuss the book with would have made it a richer experience. The book is, in a way, a meditation on the matter of the self, what’s real in the world around us and what is illusion. The bureaucrat is constantly attempting to undercover whether or not the native Mirandan phenomenon he encounters are real or simply hallucinations.
The one commentary I can offer on this book is the use of tantric sex, or sex magic. Having read another of Swanwick’s books I can tell that he is into writing about sex as a form of power, especially when it comes to women. In Stations of the Tide, Undine controls the bureaucrat through sex magic, opening his mind to the possibilities of magic on Miranda by manipulating his body. But this seems to be the only power that Swanwick offers to women, which in my opinion made the sex scenes seem a bit gratuitous and in a way, a let down. Sexual power for women is all well and good, but when that’s their only trait it leaves the characters extremely one dimensional. But then again, what do I know. Books of science fiction are, in many cases, romance novels for men, and the audience of this book felt distinctly masculine in the way the novel read.
As to how to historicize this book, again I am unsure. Previous civilizations on Miranda had enjoyed advanced technology, and this and their battle with the extraterrestrial government over advanced technology hints at Swanwick’s own ambivalence about the place of technology in human society. It gets away from us, he says, but it can also save us. This could be read as an allegory for the massive technological changes happening at the beginning of the 90s, especially the coming revolutions in personal electronics.
There’s also the issue of the haunts, a native Mirandan species wiped out by human presence. There are hints of environmentalism in the government’s obsession with finding the haunts, through there’s also a hint of the sinister in the air, as it’s never stated why people are so bent on finding out if the haunts are truly extinct.
As my read was mostly unpleasurable, I don’t feel I can recommend this book. At the same time, I do want to recommend this book. I do think there’s a lot here to unpack, especially when it comes to the world building Swanwick does. There is a lot of beautiful imagery in this book, and the glimpses of Mirandan history we do get are fascinating. I would love to hear about someone else’s reading of this book. Perhaps it wasn’t as troubled as mine.
