Rating: 
Summary: Wow!
Review: "Stations of the Tide" blew me away. It operates on so many levels it is just amazing; it's sci-fi, it's allegory, it's even a mystery. I won't endeavor to explain the rather complicated plot here, suffice it to say that this is literary science fiction at its best. That said, like many of Swanick's novels, this is not an easy read. You really have to think about the characters' motivations and emotions, about how you would act, in order to get the most out of this novel. If you can devote the energy though, this novel is second to none.
Rating:
Summary: A great story worth every page
Review: Anyone can write about Mars, and anyone can write about hero's thrust into the heart of galactic turmoil, but to write a story like Swanwick's 'Stations of the Tide' is quite a feat. Fantastic and painfully intimate, the story goes wild, literally. A fun and thought-provoking novel, it takes the stigma out of sci-fi, showing us the art of science ficiton as opposed to the genre.
Rating: 
Summary: This was an award-winner?
Review: Apparently most people think this is a fantastic book, including the Nebula Award committee. I was disappointed. The plot is somewhat tenuous, and the characters little more than empty shells around archetypal or symbolic ideas. There is an uneasy mix of about 30% future technology and 70% occultism, mysticism, and parlour magic tricks, which was not what I was expecting from an award-winning science fiction novel. Creative and thoughtful description is the hallmark of a good writer, but Stanwick often tries too hard. He sways from the mildly (and unnecessarily) distasteful [which I apparently can't quote in my review] to the outright pretentious "...docks more gap than substance, the idea of Dock a beau ideal honored more in the intent than the execution". Please. There are numerous ideas, places, people, and events mentioned in the book which peak your curiosity for more information, but it is never delivered. What is delivered is the impression that there was never any substance to support them in the first place.
Rating:
Summary: Blew me away
Review: First I read Vacuum Flowers, which amazed me: humans vs. Earth. Then I found The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and read that. I hate most fantasy, but TIDD was, again, amazing.Stations of the Tide left me agape, jaw hanging open, eyes bugged out. I read it voraciously, thinking, Me o my, this is the best sf I've ever read. Not hard sf, oh no, but in my eyes, Swanwick is the best, bar none, auteur of space opera. I like Swanwick's jump-cut style and transcendent themes. Amazing, simply amazing. And let's face it: I *want* that briefcase.
Rating:
Summary: Blew me away
Review: First I read Vacuum Flowers, which amazed me: humans vs. Earth. Then I found The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and read that. I hate most fantasy, but TIDD was, again, amazing. Stations of the Tide left me agape, jaw hanging open, eyes bugged out. I read it voraciously, thinking, Me o my, this is the best sf I've ever read. Not hard sf, oh no, but in my eyes, Swanwick is the best, bar none, auteur of space opera. I like Swanwick's jump-cut style and transcendent themes. Amazing, simply amazing. And let's face it: I *want* that briefcase.
Rating: 
Summary: Didn't Live Up To My Expectations
Review: From the reviews and the hype I had expected something a little meatier but I was a little dissappointed with what I ended up taking away from this book. Swanwick seemingly jumped from place to place, idea to idea without any transition. Information was suddenly thrown at the reader and the reader was left to use his or her imagination a great deal to fill in the gaps. That's not to say that the ideas weren't wonderful - they were. And the imagery and language was well executed. Swanwick is an excellent writer but Stations of the Tide didn't show off everything he could do as an author.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, canny, and powerful
Review: 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:
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: I had high hopes for this book, but I was ultimately disappointed by it. The plot was murky and even pretentious at times, and I wasn't involved in the characters' plight. The characters themselves tended to be obnoxious, more often than not. The novel's sole grace was that it was fast-paced, but that wasn't enough to save it for me.
Rating:
Summary: Landmark SF
Review: IMHO, this is one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade. I can't recommend it highly enough. If you're tired of the media tie-in crap that passes for imaginative literature, pick this up immediately. There's more invention here than in a hundred Star Treks.
Rating: 
Summary: Smart and haunting
Review: In one tiny little volume, Swanwick takes on technology, alien races, witches, oceans, and the nature of time. The bureaucrat goes after the wizard/criminal and nothing at all is what it seems. I tend to agree with the reviewer who found the characters to be a little too allegorical, and that did (for me) hurt the overall quality of the book. I felt somehow that the characters needed more weight to carry so much material, and I was ultimately unconvinced by the bureaucrat's final changes as a result. Still, more creativity than most writers hope to attain...
|
