Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Available within 2 business hours
From author Michael Swanwick—one of the most brilliantly assured and darkly inventive writers of contemporary fiction—comes the Nebula award-winning masterwork of radically altered realities and world-shattering seductions.
The "Jubilee Tides" will drown the continents of the planet Miranda beneath the weight of her own oceans. But as the once-in-two-centuries cataclysm approaches, an even greater catastrophe threatens this dark and dangerous planet of tale-spinners, conjurers, and shapechangers. A man from the Bureau of Proscribed Technologies has been sent to investigate. For Gregorian has come, a genius renegade scientist and charismatic bush wizard. With magic and forbidden technology, he plans to remake the rotting dying world in his own evil image-and to force whom or whatever remains on its diminishing surface toward a terrifying, astonishing confrontation with death and transcendence.
This novel of surreal hard SF was widely compared to the fiction of Gene Wolfe when it was first published, and Swanwick has gone on in the two decades since its first publication to become recognized as one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers.
With a new introduction by John Clute, author of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy
| ISBN-13: | 9781250862495 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2024 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 618,187 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.20(w) x 5.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
The bureaucrat fell from the sky.
For an instant Miranda lay blue and white beneath him, the icecaps fat and ready to melt, and then he was down. He took a high speed across the stony plains of the Piedmont to the heliostat terminus at Port Richmond, and caught the first flight out The airship Leviathan lofted him across the fall line and over the forests and coral hills of the Tidewater. Specialized ecologies were astir there, preparing for the transforming magic of the jubilee tides. In ramshackle villages and hidden plantations people made their varied provisions for the evacuation.
'Me Leviathan's lounge was deserted. Hands clasped behind him, the bureaucrat stared moodily out the stem windows. The Piedmont was dim and blue, a storm front on the horizon. He imagined the falls, where fish-hawks hovered on rising thermals and the river Noon cascaded down and lost its name. Below, the Tidewater swarmed with life, like blue-green mold Vowing magnified in a petri dish. The thought of all the mud and poverty
down there depressed him. He yearned for the cool, sterile environments of deep space.
Bright specks of color floated on the brown water, coffles of houseboats being towed upriver as the haut-bourgeois prudently made for the Port Richmond incline while the rates were still low. He touched a window control and the jungle leaped up at him, misty trees resolving into individual leaves. The heliostat's shadow rippled along the north bank of the river, skimming lightly over mud flats, swaying phragmites, and gnarled water oaks. Startled, a clutch of acorn-mimetic octopi dropped from alow branch, brown circles of water fleeing as they jetted into the silt.
"Smell that air," Korda's surrogate said.
The bureaucrat sniffed. He smelled the faint odor of soil from the baskets of hanging vines, and a sweet whiff-of droppings from the wicker birdcages. "Could use a cleansing, I suppose."
"You have no romance in your soul." The surrogate leaned against the windowsill, straight-armed, looking like a sentimental skeleton. The flickering image of Korda's face reflected palely in the glass. "I'd give anything to be down here in your place."
'Why don't you, then?" the bureaucrat asked sourly. "You have seniority."
"Don't be flippant. This is not just another smuggling case. The whole concept of technology control is at stake here. If we let just one self-replicating technology through-well, you know how fragile a planet is. If the Division has any justification for its existence at all, its in exactly this sort of action. So I would appreciate it if just this once you would make the effort to curb your negativism."
"I have to say what I think. Thats what I'm being paid for, after all."
"A very common delusion." Korda moved away from the window, bent to pick up an empty candy dish, and glanced at its underside. There was a fussy nervousness to his motions strange to one who had actually met him. Korda in person was
heavy and lethargic. Surrogation seemed to bring out a submerged persona, an overfastidious little man normally kept drowned in flesh. "Native pottery always has an unglazed area on the bottom, have you noticed?"
"That's where it stands in the kiln." Korda looked blank. is a planet, it has a constant gravity. You can't fire things in zero gravity here."
With a baffled shake of his head Korda put down the dish. "Was there anything else you wanted to cover?" he asked.
"I put in a Request For-"
"-Authority. Yes, yes, I have it on my desk. I'm afraid it's right out of the question. Technology Transfer is in a very delicate position with the planetary authorities. Now don't look at me like that. I routed it through offworld ministry to the Stone House, and they said no. They're touchy about intrusions on their autonomy down here. They sent the Request straight back. With restrictions — you are specifically admonished not to carry weapons, perform arrests, or in any way represent yourself as having authority to coerce cooperation on your suspect's part. " He reached up and tilted a basket of vines, so he could fossick about among them. When he let it go, it swung irritably back and forth.
"How am I going to do my job? I'm supposed to — what? — just walk up to Gregorian and say, Excuse me, I have no authority even to speak to you, but I have reason to suspect that you've taken something that doesn't belong to you, and wonder if you'd mind terribly returning it?"
There were several writing desks built into the panel" g under the windows. Korda swung one out and made a
inventory of its contents: paper, charcoal pens, blotters. "I don't see why you're being so difficult about this," he said at W. "Don't pout, I know you can do it. You're competent enough when you put your mind to it. Oh, and I almost forgot, the Stone House has agreed to assign you a liaison. Someone named Chu, out of internal security."
"Will he have authority to arrest Gregorian?"
"In theory, I'm sure he will. But you know planetary government — in practice I suspect he'll be more interested in
an eye on you."
'Terrific." Ahead, a pod of sounding clouds swept toward them, driven off of Ocean by winds born half a world away. The Leviathan lifted its snout a point, then plunged ahead. The light faded to gray, and rain drenched the heliostat. "We don't even know where to find the man."
Korda folded the desk back into the wall. "I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding someone who knows where he is."
The bureaucrat glared out into the storm. Raindrops drummed against the fabric of the gas bag, pounded the windows, and were driven down. Winds bunched the rain in great waves, alternating thick washes of water with spates of relative calm. The land dissolved, leaving the airship suspended in chaos. The din of rain and straining engines made it difficult to talk. It felt like the end of the world. "You realize that in a few months, all this will be under water? If we haven't settled Gregorian's case by then, it'll never be done."
“The bureaucrat fell from the sky.” This simple opening sentence introduces the protagonist of Michael Swanwick’s Nebula Award-winning Stations of the Tide, an unnamed official from the Division of Technology Transfer, dispatched to the planet Miranda following a trail of stolen technology. Every 200 years, Miranda drowns itself, its oceans swelling with the jubilee tides. As the book begins, the tides […]
