Stations of the Tide

Oh boy! I've just surfaced (very appropriate word!) from Michael Swannick's Nebula winning Stations of the Tide. An unnamed bureaucrat is sent to the planet Miranda to find a renegade scientist-cum-magician who may have possibly stolen some proscribed technology. Redolent with allusions to The Tempest, this book swings wildly from SF to fantasy and is hallucinogenic, surreal, bewildering and hypnotic. I didn't understand most of it, and even the ending was weird, but the book was enormous fun, exploding with ideas, fantastic worldbuilding and it certainly lived up to the famous quote in the Tempest

"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."

This whole book was rich and strange indeed - and only 260 pages long!