Rating: 
Summary: Swanwick rocks
Review: To be brief and to the point, everything Swanwick writes is fantastic. :)
Rating:
Summary: It didn't win the nebula for nothing!!!
Review: Wow! Any book who's coolest character is a briefcase seriously needs checking out! This is the book that earned Michael Swanwick all the praise that the science fiction community so lavishly distinguishes him with. The book takes place in the distant future of the world he created in "Vacuum Flowers" but you don't have to read that book at all. It is a totally different story. (In fact I read this one first, a really cool combination). The book follows the 'bureaucrat' as he searches the doomed oceanic world of Miranda for a wizardlike scientist by the name of Gregorian, who has stolen "unperscribed" technology. Sounds confusing? Boring? WRONG! This book is nothing at all like what it seems. Halfway through the book you are still trying to guess what it's REALLY about, but not in a yawning type way like a lot of current science fiction. The book is jammed packed with some of the coolest ideas, innovations, and cut dialogue scenes that I have ever read. Still, like any Swanwick novel, (except maybe "In the Drift") this is a very complex read. If you couldn't get five pages into Moby Dick, or don't even KNOW who Beowolf is, you may not like this novel at all. In fact, it could give you a migraine the size of Wisconsin just trying to figure out what the paragraph you JUST READ said! It is a pretty tough read, but that's another thing that makes this book great. Swanwick doesn't spend three pages explaining each totally foreign and new piece of technology, he just throws it out there on the page and you're forced to think, "What? How could the entire planet of Earth have it's own surrogate?!!" or better yet "Did his BRIEFCASE just beat the crap out of the people who stole it and then walk back to him??!!" GREAT STUFF!!!
Rating:
Summary: Stunningly Gorgeous Piece of Work
Review: _Stations of the Tide_ is, on the surface, a story about an intergalactic cop going forth to catch intergalactic criminal. Thankfully, it goes much deeper than that. Office politics, plantation society, magic, sex, and apocalypse all play primary roles in this compelling and challenging tale. The world on which the Bureaucrat (the unnamed protagonist) pursues Gregorian (the distant, subtly menacing, string-pulling antagonist) is in flux, preparing for the thousand-year flood that will immerse most of the land on the planet. The impending doom/rebirth of the world brings with it strange imagery: masquerade balls lit by furniture too heavy to move, or too cheap to bother with; a group of daughters watching their family fortunes crumble as their possessions become less and less able to finance the cost of moving them to safety, and the dying matriarch revels in their impending poverty; a fortress hidden, not by camouflage, but by centuries of studied neglect. The carnival atmosphere of the world in which the Bureaucrat gamely tries to find his quarry (for he knows he has been sent on a fool's errand) quickly turns sinister, and yet retains its lush, unearthly beauty. The action, for the most part, happens at a distance, the book being more about discovery and ideas than anything else. The denouement is truly stunning, and will leave the reader thinking about it for a long time. I highly recommend _Stations of the Tide_ to anyone tired with the usual science fiction. It is utterly magical, and totally unforgettable.
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