Receiving the Nebula award for Best Novel is no trivial feat. Past winners of this prize include Frank Herbert’s Dune, Flowers for Algernon from Daniel Keyes, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Neuromancer by William Gibson, and Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Last year Paolo Bacigalupi took home the award for The Windup Girl. It’s on my must-read list, and now, so is 1991′s winner, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick.
Join me in sending a special thanks to TOR and art director Irene Gallo for allowing us this look at the fresh cover art for upcoming reprint of Swanwick’s classic.. The beautiful illustration marries the old and the new in the same way Swanwick’s novel conjoins deep sea and deep space, space opera and mysticism. The artist is Thom Tenery and the cover designer is Jamie Stafford-Hill. You can visit Tenery’s website to see more of his art.
Michael Swanwick also penned The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. Originally released in 1991 in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine as a serial, the Library Journal describes Stations of the Tide as a story about the “the planet Miranda [as it] slowly drowns under the weight of its own tides, [and] a bureaucrat from the Division of Technology Transfer conducts an investigation into the life of a local celebrity, a ‘magician’ who possesses proscribed technology and whose personal powers hold much of the dying planet in thrall.” Publisher’s Weekly compared the piece to a “detective novel” because of the agent’s hunt for the wizard, who uses a “restricted brand of high technology to work his magic”.
Doesn’t the new cover so ingeniously spotlight this aspect of the novel by juxtaposing the “Sam Slade” character against the exotic backdrop? You can put Stations of the Tide into your own hands February 1st, 2011.
