Michael Swanwick

The blurb at the back of the book describes this as "a tightly plotted futuristic detective novel, magical and fantastic, exotic and strange, yet thoroughly grounded in cutting edge science. Michael Swanwick's volatile cocktail of surrealist ideas and invention, high technology and basic humanity explodes with insight and wonder." This is, in fact, a spot-on description of this book. It won the Nedula Award back in 1991 and its easy to see why.

The setting is the world of Miranda - a planet show more which after many years is about to enter its winter season - which means the ocean levels will rise and inundate much of its land, necessitating mass evacuations of the settler colonies that are located below the high-tide level. Its flora and fauna have evolved and adapted to cycles of life on land and underwater. After technological experimentation wiped out the native sentient life years ago (called haunts), high-level technology was proscribed and is tightly controlled by the off-world Technology Transfer Division. When a self-proclaimed magician shows up advertising that he can help people alter their bodies to live in the water, the Division sends a bureaucrat down to investigate whether he has illegally smuggled high-level technology on to the planet, or he simply a fraud, or... something else.

The style of the writing is more remnescient of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun than anything else, with its blend of science, myth and magic. the reference in the blurb to surrealist ideas is appropriate as is the reference to high technology. This is a book bursting at the seams with ideas and some spectacularly haunting scenes. For example, [very minor spoilers] offworlders can download their personalities into short lived agents and send them off to accomplish different tasks which may need to be accomplished simultaneously. At one point its mentioned that the reason why information and technology is so tightly controlled by the offworld bureacracy is because of a previous disaster on Earth where an independant AI effectively took over the entire planet by assimilating all life on it within itself. So the moment we encounter an Agent in the form of a giant earth-mother figure sent by the Earth/AI to the rest of humanity which is being held captive and interrogated is simply stunning in its power. There are so many moments and images and ideas replete with symbolism.

This is the third book I've read by Micharl Swanwick and he is fast becoming one of my favourite SF&F writers. Stations of the Tide is an outstanding novel and one to return to down the line I think. show less

This is another one that upset the balance. I tried to start it last year, but I found the opening scenes of child labour genuinely upsetting and had to put it aside. When I picked it up again they were still upsetting, and furthermore things didn’t necessarily get much better as it went along. Anyway, this is the book that tore fantasy out by the roots and shook off the dirt long before China Mieville or George RR Martin did their thing, and it makes them look like fluffy bunnys in show more comparison. However tough the action or radical the politics or cynical the power-struggles, they are still fundamentally entertainments. Swanwick’s book doesn’t subvert genre conventions; it looks them full in the face sees them for what they are and tells them to sod off. Not an easy read, but profoundly worthwhile. show less

Micheal Swanwick's Dancing With Bears is just so damn good. It's a pure sci-fi romp, carving out some sort of indefinable territory between cyber and steampunk. Confidence tricksters Dargle and Surplus help wreak havoc in postutopian Moscow! Packed with ideas, told with the wit and expertise of a born writer, it's one of the best books of the year so far. I hope Swanwick has a wheelbarrow for all the awards this'll win, and deserves to have another one full of money, too.

On rereading, damn show more this is still good stuff, wild, raunchy, violent, funny, horrific and epic, all tied upin a small perfect package. show less

Features that seem to have put other readers off of Swanwick's Stations of the Tide were all to the good for me. The protagonist is nameless throughout, an interplanetary "bureaucrat" who reminded me more than a little of Michael Cisco's "divinity student," in that he is a cog in an opaque hierarchical machine, and his transformation--eventually quite radical--is the real aim of the narrative. Comparisons I've read to the work of Gene Wolfe also seem fair, although I was more reminded of The show more Fifth Head of Cerberus than I was of Wolfe's New Sun opus. Metafictional anchors include Shakespeare's Tempest.

Stations of the Tide juxtaposes sorcery (pharmaceutical, ritual, and meditative), high technology, and espionage/crime trickery, with lots of ambivalence about which is responsible at any given moment for the difficulties being presented. A key element of the high tech is "surrogacy" by which humans achieve telepresence through androids intended to simulate them as well as to sense the remote environments. This mechanism--which seems almost inevitable given the availability of the constituent technologies--tends to undermine characters' individuality in provocative ways throughout the book. Also important is the Puzzle Palace, a shared virtual environment where the bureaucrat's Division of Technology Transfer maintains its functional offices for interplanetary operations.

The setting is the planet Miranda orbiting the star Prospero, where humans have been resident for centuries in a settler-colonist capacity. Miranda undergoes catastrophic flooding of major land masses on a recurrent long-year period, and the story takes place just as such a "winter" is imminent, with whole continents being evacuated in anticipation of it. Much of the indigenous life has the ability to adapt to such changes, transforming with the great "tide."

This book is one that demands careful reading and active interpretation; it's not genre junk-food. It does repay the effort in vivid images and rich ideas. show less