I learned everything I need to know about fantasy from a sci-fi novel

(Ignore this post and go read some Michael Swanwick, okay? Okay.)

The memory of much non-epic, non-series 1980s and ’90s fantasy has faded from the modern scene, but around the turn of the century, it was pretty much acknowledged that one of the best and most original writers in the genre was Michael Swanwick.

Swanwick had written a good chunk of short fiction throughout the 1980s (including the tremendous William Gibson collaboration Dogfight) and then started cranking out novels mid-decade, beginning with In The Drift, and then Vacuum Flowers, both of which began as shorter works that were expanded.

The book that really got him noticed by everyone in the field, and his first fantasy, was 1993’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, a book that was uncategorizable as far as sub-genre, that presage the New Weird by half a decade, and that still has few equals for inventive use of the stage-machinery of fantasy and fairy tale to tell a really unexpected story. That book made his reputation

But that’s not the book I’m talking about today.

I’m talking about Swanwick’s other early-1990s novel, the 1991 Nebula winner, Stations of the Tide.

No book has influenced how I see fantasy more than this science fiction novel.

My copy, battered from many re-readings over the years

Stations of the Tide is set on the planet Miranda, in a solar system that was clearly colonized centuries, if not thousands of years, before the start of the story. Miranda undergoes “jubilee tides,” long seasons that see vast amounts of water locked up polar icecaps for hundreds of years, only to then catastrophically melt. In the Tidewater, the low, flat swampy zone that flips back and forth between land and ocean, the native biota can take two forms – one terrestrial, one aquatic.

In the weeks before the tides are due to sweep down, as humans are evacuating the Tidewater, a bureaucrat from the orbital space habitats lands in search of Gregorian, a Mirandan who has made off with some sort of high technology denied to the inhabitants of the planet’s surface. The bureaucrat (no other name given) has no weapons, no authority to arrest Gregorian, and no backup save the occasional assistance of the corrupt local police.

The plot is episodic – the bureaucrat finds people who knew Gregorian, while being hindered by mysterious enemies, either in service of the magician, or the bureaucrat’s own rivals from the orbital society.

What makes the book special is its setting.

Many comparisons have been made between Stations of the Tide and Gene Wolfe’s novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which also takes place in a colony world with a distinctly gothic setting.

Stations takes the gothic and mystical elements of Cerberus to their full extreme.

Gregorian is setting himself up as a miracle worker – able to allow humans to transform into aquatic shapes like the native fauna, to survive the Jubilee Tides without leaving the Tidewater. And there’s an eager audience for this, as the entire Tidewater society is awash in magic.

“Gregorian is the only perfectly evil man I’ve ever met,” Undine said. Her face was suddenly cold, as harsh and stern as Caliban’s rocky plains. “He is smarter than you, stronger than you, more handsome than you, and far more determined. He has received an off-planet education that’s at least the equal of yours, and he is the master of occult arts in which you do not believe. You are insane to challenge him. You are a dead man, and you do not know it.”

“Magicians are capable of anything. Their thinking isn’t easy to follow,” the bureaucrat is told early on.

And from there, the bureaucrat is plunged into a world in which almost everyone believes in magic. There are witches and occultism, TV ads for miracles for a price, tantric sex, hallucinatory drugs, false identities, and a strange encounter with what may be the last of a lost species of shapeshifters exterminated by the early human colonists.

The fox sighed. “I have fasted and bled for six days without results. Sometimes I doubt I will every be holy enough to see the pictures.”

“You cannot see any images on television?”

A sly smile, a twitch of the whiskers. “None of my kind can. It is ironic. Our few survivors hide among you, attend your schools, work in your field, and yet we do not know you at all. We cannot even see your dreams.”

Yet this is not a science-fantasy. Every bit of magic is explicable – biotech, nanotech, stage magic and illusion. There are robots and AIs, and when the bureaucrat needs more data, he goes into a truly advanced brain-computer interface to check in which is superiors in the advanced orbital civilization high above the planet’s surface. His only reliable ally on the surface is his briefcase, which chats with him frequently and is quite capable of escaping from theft attempts on its own.

It is definitively not a fantasy novel.

But it is more fantastic than 90 percent of what is published as fantasy.

There’s a constant tension in the modern fantasy genre over exactly how much magic should be demystified.

On the one hand, there are books that don’t explain magic much, if at all¹. It’s miracles and ghosts and ancient curses and distant unknowable gods, and hostile wizards². On the other end of the spectrum, you have magic at its most explained, the “magic system” books where the author shows you the charts and graphs. This is Dungeons & Dragons magic. Advance a level, now your fireball does 5d6 damage instead of 4d6!

The difference between these types of magic is the way they can make you feel while reading. On the one hand, you have the potential of experiencing the numinous, on the other, you understand the rules of the game.

Stations of the Tide may not contain any actual magic (probably) but it is numinous as hell! It manages this despite the fact that the bureaucrat sees through, or has explained to him, the tricks used against him by magicians in the service of Gregorian.

“It was simply a conjuring trick.”

“Then how come I fell for it?”

This is what drives how I think of fantasy. It’s not whether or not the magic is real. It’s how it works in the story. Is there magic on Miranda? You could argue that magic is a very real force in the story, precisely because it is widely believed to be real. It drives people to kill and sends them to their deaths. The bureaucrat’s own story is, in part, a magical initiation, mirroring the origins of the man he’s seeking.

Several elements of the story are deliberately mysterious, such as the bureaucrat’s conversation (while unwillingly drugged) with the haunt. How much of that actually happened? We never find out, nor should we. If we take the point of view of the rational orbital society, we would blame it on the hallucinogens. If we take the point of view of a Mirandan, it may have been a haunt, or the spirit of one.

The important thing is that the book’s sympathy is with the magic. The bureaucrat may lift the veil on cheap magic tricks, but at the end, he’s the one in the role of the mystic.

“Do as you will. I command it for the third and last time.”

This is not the first time I’ve written about these themes. It’s probably going to keep coming up, for two reasons.

First, I’m a grubby little nerd who is obsessed with genre boundaries, so thinking about “What is fantasy, where are its borders?” is fun for me.

And second, because I want magic in fantasy to be fun, and cool, and mysterious, and always just a little bit out of our grasp. And a science fiction novel steeped in magic is one of the places I first found that.

Obligatory Self Promotion Corner

I’ve got a story called Terminal City Dogs coming out in Analog soonish, so subscribe or keep an eye out for that. Nothing else!

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1. Speaking of, you should read Desert Creatures, by Kay Chronister, it’s weird and good!

2. I’m using the language of secondary-world fantasy, but the divide is just as deep in urban/contemporary fantasy. The Books of Magic and Harry Potter may both star bespectacled adolescent wizards, but one of them is full of wild and unpredictable magic, and the other one is written by a shitty transphobe.