Stations of the Tide
-
-
4.2, 5 Ratings
-
-
- $7.99
-
- $7.99
Publisher Description
The Nebula Award-wining novel from Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—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.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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.
