In the meantime, Mist, the Circle's Sailor (having earned that title in The Year of our War by cold-bloodedly orchestrating the gruesome death of the then-current Sailor, her husband), has returned from a long voyage with news of a great discovery: an island called Tris, where humans and Awians live in peace and harmony, untroubled by the onslaught of insects that for 2,000 years has terrorized the Fourlands.

San dispatches a mission to Tris under Mist's command, assisted by Jant, Lightning (the Archer), and Serein Wrenn, the new Swordsman. Jant, whose half-Rhydanne inheritance includes an instinctive terror of water, embraces his old addiction to the drug scolopendium, aka "cat," in order to brave the journey and the separation from his wife, Tern, whom he suspects of an affair with the Strongman, Tornado. Under the influence of the drug, he once again shifts to the world of Epsilon, where he meets a fellow traveler, a prehistoric shark named Tarragon, who attempts to teach him how to shift without using the potentially deadly drug.

As the voyage drags on, Jant makes a shocking discovery in the ship's hold that calls into question the peaceful nature of their mission and exacerbates his distrust of Mist. Once the ship arrives at Tris, further shocks ensue, shedding a new light on the history of the Fourlands and on Emperor San himself, before events take a disastrous turn unforeseen by Jant, though perhaps not by the emperor or Mist, and the mission retreats in disarray to the Fourlands—arriving home in the midst of a revolution led by the embittered Gio Ami, who is determined to reclaim his place in the Circle ... or bring the empire crashing down.

Clever, freakish and like a comic book

Although I enjoyed The Year of Our War, I did not agree with the superlatives lavished upon that compelling but often clumsy first novel. No Present Like Time still has its flaws—many of the same flaws as its predecessor, in fact—but it is more deserving of superlatives.

Every artistic idea has its natural realization. Who hasn't had the experience of reading a novel that ideally should have been a short story, and vice versa? Less common is the situation in which a work of art is executed in a different medium from that to which it is intrinsically suited. But such is the case here. Swainston's work has earned comparisons to Miéville, Harrison and Moorcock, among others, but it seems to me that her truest forebears are to be found in comic books, which is what both No Present Like Time and The Year of Our War are, stripped of their literary trappings. What else is the Circle but the Justice League of America or the Avengers, with some of the hip histrionics of anime and manga thrown in for good measure? Realizing this helps a lot in appreciating Swainston's books.

For example, in a fantasy novel, imagined worlds and their cultures must have internal consistency and a plausible backstory in order to succeed; this requirement is absent from comics, where other factors, such as action and character, are more important. Hal Clement is not needed to design Krypton! To approach Swainston expecting the depth one finds in Stephen Erikson, for instance, is to be disappointed. But Swainston is not playing by those rules. She is not concerned with plausible world-building in presenting the social order of the Fourlands or Tris. In fact, she falls back upon many conventions of the genre—conventions, by the way, that writers like Miéville take pains to transgress—such as the unquestioned dominance of an elite ruling class over an all-but-invisible peasantry. Swainston's originality lies not in the depths of story but on its surface. She builds her worlds and characters promiscuously, playfully, taking what appeals to her from wherever she finds it, whether it fits or not. She will make it fit.

Comet really comes into his own in this novel, growing into a much more complex character as bits of his history are revealed. Similarly, facts about the emperor's past render him a more intriguing character, though also a creepier one. And once again, as in The Year of Our War, the pun-crazy shift world of Epsilon steals the show, with such inspired pieces of whimsy as the Time Fly, an insect that escapes its predators by jumping back in time and, when harnessed to an ingenious pocket watch, powers a portable time machine. Unfortunately, also as in The Year of Our War, but even more so, Swainston resolves her plot through a deus ex machina involving Jant and the Shift, and though it's refreshing to see the virtues of drug abuse get their due, the resolution is unsatisfying because it seems, albeit foreshadowed, pulled out of thin air. It is a solution imposed from without, not arising from within.

But perhaps that, too, is to judge Swainston by rules she does not recognize. There is something new in her work, something she herself seems to be still struggling toward. She's a postmodern magpie of ideas and images, gifted in arranging startling, amusing and shocking tableaus, bringing puns and metaphors unexpectedly to life, and her books—like their narrator, Comet—are clever, slightly freakish hybrids. Whether they are more than that, only time will tell.