Five Things You Didn't Know About Stations of the Tide

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To my great pleasure, Stations of the Tide is in print again! In a lot of ways, this is my strangest novel--solid science fiction that feels a lot like fantasy, filled with black constellations, Tantric sex, a sentient briefcase, a homicidal magician, a hero bureaucrat, hallucinogenic rain, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo by Ezra Pound... Oh, the list goes on and on. A lot of strange stuff went into the book. I remember, as I was writing it, thinking, "Nobody is going to get a word of this." And yet, it was the most intensely understood novel I ever wrote.

Here are five things that very few people know about Stations of the Tide but which may increase your pleasure in reading it:

1. When I began writing, I determined to include an act of magic in every chapter, beginning with an act of slight-of-hand at the beginning and growing more and more esoteric as the novel progressed. I also set a standard for myself that each instance of magic would be something that Isaac Asimov would admit (grudgingly at times, perhaps) could happen in our reality.

2. The technology on Miranda is, for reasons the system's offworld elite deem justifiable, being suppressed to 20th century levels. This is in part my response to the many, many SF stories and novels in which planetary technology is suppressed to medieval levels.

3. A lot of reviewers saw the influence of Gene Wolfe on this particular book, and I cannot deny that. Oddly, nobody seems to have noticed that of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, particularly One Hundred Years of Solitude. I threw in a shipwreck covered with orchids in the middle of a jungle just so that nobody would think I was trying to get away with anything.

4. Many people think the novel is set in Louisiana bayou country. Not so. (I've never been there. I look forward to visiting it.) It's set in an off-worldly version of Tidewater, Virginia, with just a smidge of Northern Vermont, where it borders on Canada, for seasoning. Both places I know and love.

5. There are fourteen Stations of the Cross in Catholic religion and fourteen chapters in my novel. You might think this is no coincidence, but it is. My novel had been accepted under the awful place-holder title of Sea-Twin and I only came up with its current (far superior, I believe) title at the last minute. So, much as I'd like to to take credit for this I cannot.

There's a lot more hidden in the book, but these will do for a start. If you've read it, I hope you liked it. If you haven't, I hope you'll buy it and read it and like it. That's why I wrote it.

Really, taken as a whole, the book's intent is as simple as that.

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