Stations of the Tide

Stations of the Tide is a science fiction novel by the American author Michael Swanwick, published in book form in 1991 after being serialised in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in two parts starting in mid-December 1990. Its narrator is an unnamed bureaucrat, and his employer is the Office of Technology Transfer, which exists to keep dangerous equipment out of circulation.

His assignment takes him to Miranda, where a magician is believed to have smuggled and kept proscribed technology, and where he has to bring the man in before the Jubilee tides arrive. The tides are expected to inundate the continent and remake the planet's surface, which means the world he is searching is already in disorder and changing faster than he can learn it.

The fugitive knows Miranda's local conditions and its history and the visitor does not, so the hunt is unequal from the beginning and much of the novel is about a man trying to read a place through borrowed knowledge. Little on Miranda is what it appears to be, and the story keeps its references and its answers layered rather than explaining itself.