"There Is A Tide"

See Seasons And Tides.

"There Is A Tide" is the title both of a story by Brian Aldiss and of one by Larry Niven.

In Aldiss' story, the first person narrator refers several times to "the Massacre," e.g.:

"He (and there were many others like him, unfortunately) thought of the Massacre as man's greatest achievement."
-Brian Aldiss, "There Is A Tide" IN Aldiss, Space, Time And Nathaniel (London, 1966), pp. 112-125 AT p. 115.

At the very end of the story, having learned of a coming catastrophe, the narrator reflects:

"The ten years to follow would be as terrible as the ten years of the Massacre, when every member of the white race had been slain.
"Now we negroes, in our turn, stood at the bar of history."
-op. cit., p. 125.

Reading that in my teens, I suddenly felt distanced from the narrator and his contemporaries. Now, I would primarily be concerned about the survival of the human race.

Niven's story is about the discovery in space of a small but high-gravity sphere of neutronium which causes unbelievable tides on a nearby planet. The same phrase could also have been used as the title of Niven's "Neutron Star," in which arrangements made by Puppeteers for orbiting a neutron star show that they are unaware of tides and therefore that their home planet lacks a moon. This is similar to Dominic Flandry's deduction about the nature of Chereion's sun from the fact that the range of wavelengths visible to Ayycharaych differs from the range visible to human beings. But, having shifted from tides to light, I will end the post.