introduction
BY JOHN CLUTE
Some time ago, back in the long slow halcyon worldscape of 1977, writing about John Varley’s first novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977), I found myself looking for a phrase to capture some of the sense of fresh urgent pathbreaking presentness Varley had conveyed here, and came up with the term Real Year (I called it the “real decade” then, but soon narrowed it down). I said his Real Year was almost now, that it took place in the same dawn it was being written in. This seemed remarkable (it still does). The overriding point of the term—half concept, half joke, but maybe useful—was the thought that one could usefully break down when a book was set into three: when it claims to be set (in SF, usually the future); when it was actually written (in Varley’s case, probably around 1976); and the Real Year, the time when, despite your best efforts to disguise or deny or blindsight the fact, your heart really lies. The Year whose networked density of meaning shows like a watermark through anything you write, hopefully benign, but never to be escaped. Up here in 2023, if I wanted to retrofit the term for today’s world, I’d be inclined to make it do some heavy lifting. Maybe I’d try to conceive of the Real Year as something doppelgänger-like, uncanny, half welcome, half horripilating: something telling you that you have not yet escaped the central moment of your life that locked you down then and defines you, and that you never will, no matter what jiggery-pokery adulthood you claim to have reached.
So you are always Ray Bradbury locked into his Real Year, which was 1927, and always will be; A. E. van Vogt in his desolate prairie shack before history starts; Gene Wolfe, trapped like Laocoön into the Real Year of 1951 Korea; or Philip K. Dick deep-denying the reality of everything except the classical music shop in 1950 where he heard a world the future would never abide. And so on. John Varley’s Real Year—which did not haunt him in 1977—might have been somewhere along the Pacific Rim in 1975: which is to say very much what most of us think the near future might feel like on the skin. But whatever author we look at, and whatever Real Year they inhabit, Michael Swanwick, who may be the deepest writer/reader of SF we are ever likely to encounter, knows them all, knows it all. His own Real Year, unsurprisingly, is ampler than most; it is the Time of the fully inhabited Urb, which is to say a century ago or yesterday: a metropolitan sublime his characters swim in, often unknowingly. Like Varley in 1977, Swanwick had the capacity in 1991 to tell tales you felt were set in worlds looking over your shoulder, worlds whose sound you were hearing for the first time. In their separate decades, Varley and Swanwick shared a capacity to make the Real Year and the real world seem to be the same thing. They made the impossible seem easy.
Sadly, John Varley kind of stayed in 1977; he has left us to our journey. It is a different story with Michael Swanwick, whose dance through the jungle gym and abyss of our modern Urb so excited the original readers of Stations of the Tide, which has not aged. When I first wrote about this book in 1991, it seemed to me that there was something in this eventful text full of cutting-edge technologies that was (unlike most description of cutting-edge technologies) not going to be dated within an hour; that the heart of the tale would remain as rousing and as minatory as long as we were still reading novels. In 2023 that same sense, that the world had been properly grasped, remains. The comments that follow, with some small expansions for clarity, represent what I thought in 1991, and think now.
Stations of the Tide (I said then) is a tour de force of metamorphosis and instauration, a renovation of how SF speaks to us for a new era, a clever read, a wise book. Like any really good SF novel written by an intelligent author at the peak of his craft, it is a byte dance and sorting of all the SF protocols we are likely to call up from memory. In a knowing prefatory note, Swanwick acknowledges various predecessors into whom he has dipped like Oedipus—C. L. Moore, Dylan Thomas, Brian Aldiss, Ted Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid: a noticeably genre-fluid mix—and he could have mentioned quite a few more, Algis Budrys and Gene Wolfe for two; but perhaps there was no real need to be comprehensive, because we know he knows everybody and has eaten at the table with all the grown-ups, for the book is radiant with the language and moves of genre-edge, of Real Year being told for the first time.
The narrative takes place, for instance, within the familiar frame of a coercive galactic federation of some sort; but to understand the shape and feel of that federation and its artifacts, one must envision not an extremely large, traditional high school space-opera universe governed in secret by Our Miss Brooks (which is to say Hari Seldon governing Trantor, without the laughs), but a Theatre of Memory. Swanwick’s galaxy is more like John Crowley’s almost infinitely complex Edgewood than simplex Trantor; his universe could almost be described as a cabinet of curiosities, everything in that cabinet being both itself and something else (the Art of Memory is a Doppelgänger Art). Caught in the coils of this galaxy—and chafing under the control of galactic “bureaucrats” who continue to quarantine her from the devastating lures of high technology—is the ocean-dominated planet Miranda, long settled by human stock and now approaching the climax of its Great Year (similar planetary models feature in novels by Swanwick’s contemporary Paul Park, and of course in Brian Aldiss’s Helliconia books). Very soon now, as the Year turns, Ocean will transform much of Miranda into an island, though maybe without a Prospero to save it; human societies will retreat into the highlands and quite possibly mutate there; and if there are any indigenes left (no one knows for sure) after a long summer more friendly to invasive humans than to them, they will soon metamorphose into “winter” mode, and live through the long season underwater (it is a fate to which many humans aspire).
These shape-changing natives down from the uplands, whom humans call “haunts,” may or may not have already learned how to take on human form and pass as human in the low-lying, densely inhabited, soon-to-be-drowned Creole deltas of the planet—for Miranda does not resemble only Prospero’s island awaiting the tempest of the Great Year, but also the home world of Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)—but no one knows, and the tale itself doesn’t tell us: for the haunts who literally haunt Miranda from below its surface hum and buzz are, as though they were avatars of the planet’s own Real Year, omnipresent but unfaceable. More mundanely, like race memories of the anthropophagy of colonialism, they lend the incessant novelty of the tale a constant anchor and ostinato, an unerring mysterious-stranger gravitas beneath the data-driven surge of story.
That story itself—as in Swanwick’s earlier Vacuum Flowers—is something of a McGuffin. Gregorian, a human born on the planet, and as simultaneously chthonic and estranged as Caliban, has apparently stolen some proscribed technology, and has gone to ground carrying this Prometheus Fire into the swarming Creole Tidewater region of his birth. We never really find out what that technology is (or if, in fact, it has actually been stolen). Gregorian soon begins to upset the applecart by appearing in television ads in which he claims to be able to adjust humans to the great change coming, to make them (in effect) into haunt-like winter morphs: into natives. It is now that the book really begins. A “bureaucrat” whose name we are never given descends downwards from the galactic federation’s Puzzle Palace—a vast autonomous space habitat, whose resemblance to a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities or Theatre of Memory (see above) cannot be adventitious—downwards out of safe dark intricate space, downwards (it is a long journey) into exile on Miranda to seek out Gregorian. The rest of Stations of the Tide concentrates upon his attempts, which only initially seem fumbling, to trace both Gregorian and a traitor within the Palace who has been supplying him with vital information. The bureaucrat, whose initial air of stressed-out incompetence proves to be entirely superficial, eventually succeeds in controlling Gregorian/Caliban, and in capping the phallic imperialism of Gregorian’s secret father in orbit. At novel’s close he finally frees his nearly omnicompetent suitcase-AI, who/which is not actually called Ariel, to the elements—by which point it is difficult to know whether we should be calling him Prospero, or perhaps Michaelmas, after the eponymous hero of Algis Budrys’s stunning Michaelmas (1977), or perhaps both—and in the final pages, Prospero or Michaelmas, hero hypnopomp of the memory-laden progress of story, leaps metamorphosing into his final station, the unestranging sea.
But if the haunts below give weight to what Swanwick calls the “immanence of the land’s passing,” and the McGuffin above gives to Stations of the Tide a necessary narrative impetus, the real heart of the book may well lie in the sense it imparts of how hard it is to tell at all, even with the help of memory tricks and doppelgänging cues, veils unveiling more veils. The book is immensely full. The central Puzzle Palace is a palace of marvels woven from many worlds, a marriage of the Renaissance theatre of the mind and cyberpunk, in which the memory thespians and friezes of our Terran sixteenth century become partials (a term Greg Bear used more than once) of the whole person, and walk. And there is much, much more: the intense, verb-dominated thrust of the language; the intersecting dances of partials and persons, haunts and AIs, plots and epiphany: all the gifts of Swanwick’s freighted economy. It is the outside of the inside of the data of the dance. All this makes the Real Year of the book something very much like Now. Metamorphic and memorious, Stations of the Tide is itself the Puzzle Palace that lies within its heart. It is a shape for the knowing we’re going to need.
John Clute
1991, 2023
1THE LEVIATHAN IN FLIGHT
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 highspeed 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.
The Leviathan’s lounge was deserted. Hands clasped behind him, the bureaucrat stared moodily out the stern 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 growing 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 a low 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, it’s 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. That’s 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. “This 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?”
Copyright © 1991 by Michael Swanwick
Introduction copyright © 2023 by John Clute
