Stations of the Tide

The planet Miranda has a fifty year cycle. For most of it the continent is dry and habited, and then the Jubilee Tides come, the ocean rises hundreds of metres, and everything below the highlands goes under for a generation. The evacuation is under way when the novel opens, and the coastal towns are being emptied, burned and abandoned in an atmosphere of carnival and looting.

Into this comes a bureaucrat from the Department of Technology Transfer, unnamed throughout, sent to recover proscribed technology stolen by a magician called Gregorian. Off world authority permits Miranda only the tools it judges safe, and Gregorian is selling immortality, transformation into a creature that can survive the flood, and possibly nothing at all except very good stagecraft.

The chase takes the bureaucrat down the coast through a country coming apart: a haunted television, a briefcase with a personality, an interrogation conducted in a simulation, and a series of people who have already decided not to leave.

Swanwick writes it as science fiction that behaves like fantasy on purpose, in a world far enough ahead that the difference has stopped being legible. Nothing is explained on arrival, the prose is dense and allusive, and the plot's actual shape only resolves in the last thirty pages.

Around a quarter of a million words is what it feels like and it is in fact under three hundred pages, which tells you how compressed it is.

Best for readers who want something genuinely strange and well made, and who are happy to work. Readers who want their science fiction to explain its own rules should look elsewhere.