The Annotated STATIONS OF THE TIDE (Part 2)

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the Outer Circle:  The far regions of the Prosperan System. All the most dangerous research is conducted as far from population centers as possible.

 

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Continent: There being only one continent, it needs no other name.

 

sparrowfish: The Great Winter morph of what is, in the Great Summer, a rainbird.

 

 

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Witch Cults of Whitemarsh: The chapter heading was inspired by Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and was meant to suggest that the witch cults of the Tidewater are matriarchal in structure.

 

[the magic trick explained]: This is a change on the original Vanishing Bird Cage trick, which relied on the audience not knowing that the dove inside the cage had been squashed when it collapsed.

 

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Laserfield Academy: Like many private academies, Laserfield is named after its location. Since the original technology of the field, whether for communications or planetary defense, is long obsolete, it can be assumed that this is a very old name, from the early days of Miranda’s colonization.

 

elfinbone: Ivory, derived from the German word “Elfinbein.” I had thought it an archaic word but recently I have seen it claimed that Jorge Luis Borges credited James Joyce with its creation for Finnegans Wake. Either way, it is a charming word.

 

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Captain Bergier: This “scrawny-bearded poet,” edging into senility, is an avatar of Ezra Pound. This was inspired the following lines from Bob Dylan’s “Destination Row:”

 

            And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

            Fighting in the captain’s tower

            While calypso singers laugh at them

            And fishermen hold flowers

 

Like Pound, Captain Bergier has been driven to the edge of madness by his economic theoretics.

 

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Lightfoot: A small town in the Virginia Tidewater, not far from Williamsburg.

 

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fleur-de-vie: “Flower of life,” the vagina.

 

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