The Incredible Tide

Overview

The Incredible Tide tells the story of Conan, a boy who lives alone on a small island on Earth ravaged by World War III. The world was knocked off its axis and the continents have sunk into the ocean, with only small islets remaining. Conan is rescued but finds that the new society is very different from the world he knew before.

Backstory

The West

Conan, Lanna and Teacher are survivors of a land called the West, or the Western World, that now no longer exists, as a result of the cataclysmic destruction caused by the war. The West is described as having been a generally peaceful place.

The Peace Union

Although the reasons behind the war are not clear, a global superpower known as the Peace Union waged war against the West, finally using a doomsday weapon that destroyed their enemies, but destroyed themselves as well. The Peace Union does not exist anymore, but its leftover artifacts are everywhere.

The Change

The doomsday weapon that the Peace Union used was magnetic in nature and caused a disruption in the Earth's core, causing massive worldwide earthquakes that changed the shape of land and sea alike. Huge tsunamis inundated all the world's coastlines; this was the "incredible tide" mentioned in the book's title. People now refer to this time as the Change.

The New Order

A group of people have recolonized a surviving Peace Union city, which they call Industria, and call themselves the New Order. They are trying to unite the survivors of the world under their banner and recreate the former civilization's technological glory. Of course, they consider themselves to be doing everyone a favor and expect everyone to be grateful or be subject to punishment.

High Harbor

The Western survivors made their way to an island and created High Harbor, a place of refuge, where they live peacefully, but it is a hard life, without many technological comforts.

Characters

Conan

Once Conan of Orme, a place in the West that no longer exists, Conan is 17 years old when the story begins. The incredible tide of the title caused the fleeing helicopter he was in to crash on its way to the island refuge that would become High Harbor, marooning him on a tiny island as the sole survivor, where he learned to survive on his own and has been living for five years. As a result of the hardship he has grown very strong.

Lanna

Lanna is described as a small, birdlike girl, and indeed she has several friends who are birds, including a tern named Tikki. She seems to have an empathic connection with birds that lets her communicate with them on a rudimentary level. She is a friend of Conan's who hasn't seen him since the cataclysm. Mazal is her aunt, Shann is her uncle, and Teacher is her grandfather. She has a deep-seated fear of the ocean since the tsunamis swept across the world.

Teacher

Teacher is a lean old man with a white beard and a mass of thick white hair who knows Conan and is the grandfather of Lanna. He is very wise, to the point of knowing how to communicate telepathically with Conan and Lanna's aunt Mazal over great distances. His real name is Briac Roa, and he is in hiding because the leaders of the New Order want to find him and use his knowledge to recreate the technology that the old world used to have.

Mazal and Shann

Lanna's Aunt and Uncle, they are the leaders of High Harbor. Mazal is Teacher's daughter and periodically receives telepathic messages from him, although she can't always make contact. She is also Lenna's mother's sister. Shann is a doctor and husband of Mazal..

Citizen Doctor Manski

A researcher who serves on a New Order exploration team, charting islands and searching for Briac Roa, Doctor Manski is totally committed to the New Order cause. She hates Westerners because a Westerner killed her son in the war, and thus she hates Conan too—but she is so dedicated to the New Order that she wants to make sure his youth and strength are put to work for the New Order.

Commissioner Dyce

Dyce is a trader from the New Order, but he is more than that; he is also an agent of the New Order. He has come to High Harbor to take anything he can get his hands on that might help the New Order, and he is frustrated whenever he demands something that isn't in the trade agreements and Shann denies him.

Orlo

A rebellious teenager at High Harbor who has decided to break away from the rule of Mazal, Shann, and Teacher, and has begun drawing more teenagers and children to his cause. Unfortunately the rebellion seems to be mostly for rebellion's sake—he's willing to steal food and even deal with the New Order to preserve his autonomy.

Plot

The story alternates between the experiences of Conan and Lanna. A New Order ship discovers the island where Conan has been surviving for five years since the helicopter crash and captures him, taking him back to the city of Industria as a worker. Meanwhile, Lanna and her parents at High Harbor have to deal with Dyce, who wants her people to supply lumber faster than they can with the tools they have and is desperate for knowledge of the whereabouts of Briac Roa.

The New Order seems to be resurrecting only the worst of the fallen civilization's qualities, putting together a military-industrial complex without a culture or conscience. Without telling him what it will mean, they mark his forehead with a tattoo that designates him as an "apprentice citizen," meaning that he will have to work to pay off the "debt" that he owes in gratitude for having "rescued" him. Enraged, he seizes the tattooing device and marks several self-important officials before he is subdued, and they assign him to work for a crazy old man named Patch, who turns out to be Teacher. Teacher has been hiding in Industria since the cataclysm, since it is the last place where the New Order would ever look for him, hiding his identity by acting like an insane, crippled old man.

At High Harbor, Lanna and her parents are continuing to deal with Dyce and his demands—now he wants some wrecked aircraft that are on the island and some sassafras roots. Teacher has said that the New Order should by no means have those aircraft or the roots (the trees haven't yet multiplied to populations where there are enough to trade). Lanna finds out that they also have to deal with Orlo, who has been leading a rebellious tribe of children and teenagers that has broken away from the rest of High Harbor.

Teacher, in the guise of Patch, is still an apprentice citizen despite having been in Industria for years, because he likes where he is: in a boat shop, building boats. No one else in Industria knows how to build them—the city wasn't even on the coast before the Change. But Teacher has been planning to leave, and now that Conan is here, Teacher can put those plans into motion.

Sickness breaks out at High Harbor, and Dyce is the only one who has any medicines. Lanna discovers that not only is Orlo trying to take over High Harbor, he's making deals with Dyce. Teacher discovers that there's going to be another earthquake, and this one will drop half of what remains of Industria into the sea. His humanitarian nature forces him to go to the council and tell them who he really is so he can warn them, but he wants Conan to take the boat he's been building and wait for him at a designated rendezvous point.

Influence on Hayao Miyazaki

In 1978 Hayao Miyazaki directed a 26-episode series called Future Boy Conan, based on The Incredible Tide. The themes of living sustainably in harmony with nature rather than coercing it with technology, and of villains trying to recover the technology that nearly destroyed the world in the past, both recurred strongly in the first full-length film Miyazaki later wrote and directed, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), and in the 1982-1994 manga of the same name by Miyazaki on which he partly based his film. The idea of the world being covered in water made its way into the third act of Ponyo. Miyazaki's interpretation of Lana would serve as a prototype for Sheeta from Castle in the Sky.

Availability

While the actual book has long been out-of-print, it became available again in digital form by Open Road Integrated Media in 2014.