Admittedly, if you wait thirty years, you're almost guaranteed to find new things. You may have forgotten what you found the first time around, too. And if you read the book over Easter weekend, you may notice something incredibly obvious that you somehow missed when you were in your early twenties.
Michael Swanwick won the Nebula in 1991 for the novel Stations of the Tide. It has fourteen chapters, covering the time before a local apocalypse on the planet Miranda, focused on a character we only know as "the bureaucrat."
And I only just this time realized how much that structure and title are analogous to the stations of the cross. (To be fair to me, I'm no more religious than I think Swanwick is. And the stations of the cross is very much A Catholic Thing, and I was only a very vague Protestant in my youth.) There are also strong echoes of The Tempest, and more buried references to The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Lurking far in the background are the inevitable memories of Heart of Darkness.
It is the medium future, at least a few hundred years on, but humans are still recognizable and in their current form. At least one AI apocalypse has happened, to Earth as is traditional, but human civilization survived and its center is now in space habitats. The scope and scale of that civilization is not germane to this book, but humanity spans multiple star systems, and their core habitats are probably mostly in the Solar System. They have limited AI, as locked-down assistants usually manifest in the physical world as "briefcases," and as agents, copies of a human mind that are sent to act for that human and then be re-absorbed into the parent. It's not quite a post-scarcity techno-utopia, but it's well along that line: rich and comfortable and healthy.
The bureaucrat works for Technology Transfer. His job, as we see it, seems to be mostly to stop technology transfer, to make sure planetary populations don't spark another runaway AI spike, that they stay within the rigid limits the more powerful and dominant space civilization imposes. He's part of a vast government structure, as his name implies, but he has far less immediate power and influence than we might expect at first.
He arrives on Miranda just before the change in their great year, chasing Gregorian, a local who worked in the space civilization for a while and may have fled home with forbidden technology. Gregorian claims to be a magician who can transform humans into sea-borne life, among other powers. With the right tech, that might even be true. There are other mysteries in Gregorian's past that the bureaucrat will need to trace and explicate before he's done on Miranda, too.
Swanwick doesn't describe Miranda's orbital period, or give us any info-dumps. So we know that Great Summer is turning into Great Winter, that the poles are melting swiftly, and that the entire continent of the Tidewater will be flooded for the next several decades - but not the details of why or how. We do know this will all happen quickly, and accept that for the sake of a premise.
The Tidewater is being evacuated, its entire population selling off their valuables, settling old scores, and maneuvering for their changed lives in the Piedmont, another continent that will not be flooded. Across this upended landscape, the bureaucrat travels with a local police office, Lieutenant Chu, chasing rumors of Gregorian as the time of the jubilee tides gets nearer and nearer.
Stations is a sequence of events, like beads on a string, as the bureaucrat learns more and more about Miranda and gets closer and closer to Gregorian. It's not a chase, it's not a thriller. It's not very plot-heavy at all; each chapter tends to start quietly, in a different place somewhat later in time than the previous. Swanwick has no ticking clock: we know the jubilee tides are near, but never, until they hit at the end, how much time is left. What's important is that they are inexorably coming, not the number of moments until then.
There are Clarkean moments of "magic," which has led some readers to place this book somewhere closer to magical realism or fantasy. It definitely nods to magical realism - it is a book that knows magical realism exists, and wants to use tropes and ideas from that genre - but I think everything that happens is explicably SFnally. This is far in the future, and radical biological transformations have been long possible, if long outlawed.
And it ends well, better than I remembered and not the way a reader might expect. The bureaucrat does find Gregorian, as he must. The tides hit, as they were always going to. And I remembered the crisp, perfect last line - but not the why and the how of it.
It is a fine SF novel, a major award winner still worth reading, a book where the SF furniture has only dated slightly: there's a lot of talk of "television" that would be "video" or something similar in a book from this decade. It is resonant and true, and I'm glad I found it in a box at the back of the basement and decided to read it again.
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