The bureaucrat's mission takes him through a succession of vivid and grotesque locales - a decaying mansion where Gregorian's dying mother and spiteful sisters live in mutual torment, an unearthly rain of mushroom spores, a virtual environment called the Puzzle Palace - as the monstrous wizard balks and humiliates him at every turn. Restricted from using his advanced technologies, the bureaucrat must locate and deal with Gregorian - 'the only perfectly evil man I've ever met' and the bureaucrat's undoubted intellectual superior - before the coming tides erase his faint trail. Into this collapsing world comes an unnamed bureaucrat from the Division of Technology Transfer, seeking a brilliant scientist named Gregorian who fled to Miranda with proscribed technology and set himself up as a local wizard. An elite corps of technocrats governs the star system from habitats in space, restricting access to high technology and promoting widespread resentment. The novel is set on Miranda, a backward planet facing the imminent jubilee tides that inundate half of its continent every hundred years. In Stations of the Tide he succeeds in evoking a detailed world and complex intrigue in less than 250 pages.

Readers of Swanwick's short fiction and his novel Vacuum Flowers know of his gift for writing compact, intelligent prose that can dramatize scientific speculations with unusual verve.

MICHAEL SWANWICK'S Stations of the Tide (Morrow, $19.95) combines technological wizardry, exotic ecosystems and a journey across the face of a drowning world in a novel of great ingenuity and panache.

Vacuum Flowers by Michael Swanwick