Swainwick's Stations of the Tide

This is one of my favorite books. The imagery here is just imprinted in my brain, and I re-read it pretty frequently--it's probably in my top dozen or so most re-read books.

I don't quite know where to stick Swanwick's work generally. His style seems to vary a good deal from one piece to the next, and he's as remarkable for his ability to seamlessly slip out of SF/F tropes as for his way of breathing life into well-used ones. Like most of the best SF authors, he displays no concern for the "boundaries" of the genre; most people seem to know Swanwick from The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I'll have to re-read one of these days--it's basically a straightforward attack on the bastardized-Tolkien fantasy one sees so much of, and, more deliciously for one such as me, a bit of categorical landmine for the critically-minded.

Why oh why must categories be so fun?

Incidentally, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the most pessimistic novels I've ever encountered, and that includes McCarthy's The Road. It's just, y'know, you don't expect that level of nihilism in a book that has like elves and shit.

But. Stations of the Tide remains, for me, his most affecting work. Three points stick out for me: the range and vivid nature of the imagery, the magic, and the re-representational/simultaneity/heteroglossic style.

Also, the main character is only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat". He's middle-aged, not in particularly good shape, not all-knowing, not an Action Hero or Competent Man nor even a Human Camera on a sight-seeing trip; he's a really interesting character. And he's only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat".

The basic plot runs thusly: it's some point in the (presumably far) future. Humanity has colonized a number of other worlds/solar systems, and the most advanced civilizations seem to be large "floating cities" in space. Technology is controlled by the government; worlds such as Miranda, where most of the novel takes place, are under a relatively high restriction regarding what kinds of technology can be manufactured, used, or owned. A citizen of Miranda who has been off-world has returned, possibly with some stolen technology, and an agent of the government is sent to find him.

Nothing terribly new here. The notion of artificially-constrained technology goes way back, probably most memorably done in Dune. To Swanwick's credit, the treatment here is a lot more nuanced and believable--technology controlled for multiple reasons, socio-economic as well as environmental, and with a Butlerian-Jihad-esque event in the background. (The bureau of technology control seems to be a much wiser response to a catastrophe than Herbert's post-Jihad world--but then Swanwick didn't feel some inexplicable urge to have both starships and melee combat as central plot devices. I digress.) There's little or no technology here that hasn't been fictionally explored in depth elsewhere--AI, nanotech, etc.

But Swanwick turns all this into gold. His writing throws us into the world he's created-gah! I love it. I've written elsewhere (have to put that up) of the various techniques that authors use, SF authors particularly, to establish the fine-grained texture: the sense of both the concrete phenomenal qualities of the immediate action, and also grounding that experience in a sketched-out larger world. Both conditions are necessary for really engrossing difference to be met with the appropriate level of disbelief-suspension. You could use this novel as an example of how to do this well.

In Stations of the Tide Swanwick steers clear of exposition, only grudgingly letting the important concepts drop into our laps. Thus we never get an explanation for most of this huge landscape he evokes; one is left with more questions than answers. The protagonist is fixated on his goal, and so we see all this other intriguing stuff from, as it were, his peripheral vision. The corners of his eyes. He doesn't focus on the Thulean stargazers, the complex cultural accommodation of Miranda's jubilee tides--doesn't reflect on the use of The Tempest in naming the celestial bodies, or the physical/social nature of the Puzzle Palace, or even the exact planetary processes about to plunge a continent underwater. The television melodrama playing in the background throughout the novel enters into his consciousness, and hence ours, more thoroughly than any of the hard or soft science in which we as readers might be interested. Through brief, non-expositional passages, we get a sense of the history and nature of both the larger world and the protagonist himself, sometimes at once: as when a woman the bureaucrat used to be sexually involved with asks him, "do you realize that we've never met?"

It's a bit like Cherryh's celebrated "extremely limited third," a smooth and unpretentious style that is very good at showing (as opposed to telling). But Swanwick gives his characters more room, never really getting inside their heads--it's essential, here, as the central cast are all concerned with varying degrees of deception. Rather than neat summaries of either the cultural or psychological landscapes, we're given many monologues and stories and digressions from other characters, always discernibly biased in a way that would be difficult to write or enjoy reading at book length, but that work in these little doses to make a patchwork panorama of both characters and world. Swanwick also isn't afraid to take a moment and admire the scenery, or have his narrator comment a bit more eloquently than the protagonist seems likely to do--as when the ongoing television series is described as "a scream straight from the toad at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze." But, for the most part, all we get are the aspects of the world that the bureaucrat notices.

What a world it is! The imagery, the startling ideas, are one of the strongest reasons you should read this book. Some samples: an entire continent is about to be submerged, as happens every few centuries. All the native life, including the aborigines, have evolved some form of amphibiousness, often two distinct life-phases. "Fairy" fungi grow amazingly quickly, covering entire buildings in fragile waving structures. The bones of the deceased are wired together and set to hang from trees. Witches practice strange rites. Skeletal robotic "surrogates" walk about with television screens for heads, showing the faces of the human using them.

The AI that ate Earth is represented as a giant naked woman in shackles. When the bureaucrat asks her what she wants, Earth replies: "What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you in my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones."

There's also magic going on in this book. Witchcraft, voodoo and the like (the whole of the Tidewater has this hard-to-pin-down Mississippi Delta feel; it comes out most in the darkly magical, the swampy landscape, and the carnival abandon of the inhabitants. Without ever making a clear allusion outside a few French names, there's more than a pinch of New Orleans here, I think).

But it's not really magic--it's all tricks, sleight of hand, misdirection, drugs and technology.

Or...maybe there is magic here.

I'd like to argue that this book problematizes the boundary, deconstructs the binary, pick your terminology--it really messes about with what magic is. Not in the way that Swanwick will do later (there are no fighter jets that are also dragons etc.), but by highlighting the subjective, deceptive, and recollective aspects of "magic". And more than that--even when the book brings a technologically-savvy skepticism to all the so-called "supernatural" events, it denies us access to a single, objectively true narrative. We see what the bureaucrat sees, which is often a maze of illusion and misdirection; his attempts to get to the bottom of things yield only more ambiguity. A variety of answers are offered to his every questions, some of them obviously false, none of them obviously true. And Swanwick coolly messes with our expectations--as SF readers we're prepared, for example, to believe in a hidden population of shape-shifting aliens; then another character offers an in-depth analysis of population mechanics and extinction that renders this hypothesis suspect. Simultaneously, slow clues throughout the novel make us doubt all the bureaucrat's sources of information. It's at once a critique of the notion of "magic" (if magic is just illusion used to achieve a certain end, and if all manipulations of others fit on that spectrum where does that leave us?) and also of the massive structure of assumptions, the received knowledge (from specialists, from scientists & historians, from witnesses) that we build our world-view on.

The result is not an utterly groundless world, one lacking a solid past or physical constancy--but it is one in which certainty is unattainable. We learn enough to get a little of that "sense of wonder" us SF junkies are always after, and the bureaucrat learns enough to get by. The bureaucrat's progress and personal survival seem to question whether the loss of such a necessarily-flawed world-view (one might call it the totality-demanding world-view) is really so tragic. Pragmatic, fluid world-views, ones with lots of admitted flaws, seem to work pretty well.

Clarke had that famous line, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But of course, good relativists (or rather embodied, situated, contextualized viewpointed-ists) like ourselves know enough to stick on a caveat: "...from a sufficiently primitive perspective." Clarke's dictum ignores the existence of omni-skeptics, "Brights" such as myself who would never consider phenomena to be "supernatural". The irony in Stations of the Tide is that the bureaucrat should be such a skeptic--he's more highly educated and more technologically advanced than the inhabitants of Miranda. Instead, he becomes deeply enmeshed in all of this craziness, has his illusion of objective totality and culturally-specific reality ripped away. The universe here is not laid out on some cosmic autopsy table, ultimately effable and orderly; it's kicking and scratching, slipping around corners, grinning as it shuffles the deck. The question is not whether or no there is some ultimate order, it's whether and how we know and work with the world.

Another irony is that the bureaucrat, as the viewpoint character, should be the one we as readers identify with--Office Joe adventures in the land of Voodoo Crazies. To a certain extent these kinds of characters are necessary in SF--characters whose sense of normalcy and difference is close enough to the readers' that they will focus on what the reader would--and to a certain extent the bureaucrat fits this model. He also turns out to be in many ways more post-human than is immediately apparent; the witches and gypsy-seeming folk of Miranda who seem so exotic at first turn out to have life-experiences much more understandable than the elite of the floating cities.

The novel is, dare I say it, post-modern. But in a quiet way, a deep way. The wild and fantastic imagery take center stage, and it's only later that these ambiguities begin to resonate. Swanwick distracts with the surface ideas, the exotic settings and characters and such, while playing out other ideas much more quietly. The Puzzle Palace, for example, is probably the most subtle and effective virtual...thing...I've ever encountered in fiction, more functional and tangible than Gibson's cyberspaces, less self-important than Williams' Otherland, and with hints of texture and depth that I've not found anywhere else.

Stations of the Tide is also highly unconventional in how it unfolds. Although the close third person of the bureaucrat makes up the primary frame, Swanwick constantly hits us with re-represented stories, stories told directly from the mouths of other characters. Thus we get long bits from characters who aren't the bureaucrat, who have their own histories and foci, their own biases. Its another way of presenting swaths of culture and character without succumbing to the lure of objectivity. Swanwick eventually throws several kinds of technological enhancement into the mix: semi-sentient recorded diaries that overlap with historical documents that are themselves reconstructed, stories made mysterious by surrogate orators, absorbed memories from identity-clones in the Puzzle Palace. Really you have to read the book to get all this--the point is, what feels like a fairly traditional third-person SF whodunit rapidly but quietly evolves into this heteroglossic mosaic, with the narrative suddenly leaping and changing. But it never breaks; the flow always stays with the bureaucrat, and we know no more than he does.

There are far too many writers today who would take all these ideas and flog them to death. There's enough material here to fuel some Night's Dawn-length monstrosity (sorry Pete), but Swanwick is content to craft this really beautiful novel and clock it in at about 250 pages. I just saw the other day that it's been re-printed (a lot of good SF re-printing going on lately), so it's probably around somewhere if you look. Someday I'll try to write something more concise about this, but I'll probably wind up being even more long-winded.

And I didn't even mention the weird resonances I get between this and dystopian novels, nor the tantric sex! Crazy.

Alright, as you can see from this, my third post, I'm not keeping up my writing with my reading, so I'm gonna try to do more "in briefs" and keep these longer rants for stuff I really feel for.

Jake out.

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