Powers, Tim 1952–

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Powers, Tim 1952–

(William Ashbless, Timothy Thomas Powers)

PERSONAL:

Born February 29, 1952; son of Richard (an attorney) and Noel Powers; married Serena Batsford (a legal secretary), 1980. Education: California State University, Fullerton, B.A., 1976. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Russell Galen, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, 845 Third Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Writer. Has taught at Clarion Workshop and Writers of the Future.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, 1984, for The Anubis Gates, and 1986; Prix Apollo, c. 1984, for The Anubis Gates; Philip K. Dick Award, 1985, for Dinner at Deviant's Palace; Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, 1990, for The Stress of Her Regard; World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, World Fantasy Convention, 1993, for Last Call, and 2001, for Declare; International Horror Guild best novel award, 2001, for Declare.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Skies Discrowned, Laser (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976, revised edition published as Forsake the Sky, Tor (New York, NY), 1986.

An Epitaph in Rust, Laser (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976, revised edition, NESFA Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

The Drawing of the Dark, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 1979.

The Anubis Gates, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Dinner at Deviant's Palace, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1985.

On Stranger Tides, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1987.

The Stress of Her Regard, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1989.

Last Call, Morrow (New York, NY), 1992.

Expiration Date, Tor (New York, NY), 1996.

Earthquake Weather, Tor (New York, NY), 1997.

Fault Lines, Guild America (New York, NY), 1998.

Declare, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2001.

Powers of Two (contains An Epitaph in Rust and The Skies Discrowned), NESFA Press (Framingham, MA), 2004.

Three Days to Never, William Morrow (New York, NY), 2006.

OTHER

(As William Ashbless) Twelve Hours of the Night (poetry), Cheap Street (New Castle, VA), 1985.

Night Moves (short stories), introduction by James P. Blaylock, Axolotl (Seattle, WA), 1986, published as Night Moves and Other Stories, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2000.

(With James P. Blaylock) The Way down the Hill (short stories), Axolotl (Seattle, WA), 1986.

(As William Ashbless) A Short Poem (poetry), Folly Press (Tacoma, WA), 1987.

(With Richard B. Isaacs) The Seven Steps to Personal Safety: How to Avoid, Deal with, or Survive the Aftermath of a Once-in-a-Lifetime Violent Confrontation (nonfiction), Center for Personal Defense Studies (New York, NY), 1993.

(With James P. Blaylock) The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2001.

(With James P. Blaylock) Strange Itineraries (short stories), Tachyon Publications (San Francisco, CA), 2005.

A Soul in a Bottle (novella), illustrated by J.K. Potter, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2006.

Contributor of science-fiction short stories to periodicals, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

SIDELIGHTS:

Two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, science-fiction and fantasy novelist Tim Powers is recognized for his intricately plotted stories filled with well-rounded and often outlandish characters. In many of his novels, including The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard, Powers deals with time travel, and these historical fantasies are often populated by authentic figures. He also favors fantastic episodes featuring supernatural and mythical characters and exhibits a penchant for the horrific, adventurous, and grotesque. "A Tim Powers science-fiction novel never fails to titillate and elucidate with the dark and the bizarre," Sue Martin remarked in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "and all with such original, eccentric color and style."

Powers won his first Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for his action-packed science-fiction mystery and horror thriller The Anubis Gates. The novel details the adventures of Brendan Doyle, a twentieth-century English professor who travels to 1810 London to attend a lecture given by English romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he is kidnapped by gypsies and consequently misses his return trip to 1983, the mild-mannered Doyle is forced to become a street-smart con man, escape artist, and swordsman in order to survive in the dark and treacherous London underworld. He defies bullets, black magic, murderous beggars, freezing waters, imprisonment in mutant-infested dungeons, poisoning, and even a plunge back to 1684. Coleridge himself and poet Lord Byron make appearances in the novel, which also features a poor tinkerer who creates genetic monsters and a werewolf that inhabits others' bodies when his latest becomes too hairy.

The Anubis Gates met with an enthusiastic critical reception. Reviewers commended Powers' inventive and lively storyline and applauded his finesse in managing the twisting and jam-packed plot. In addition, critics praised his characters, especially his roguish beggars, whom they compared to some of the wretched characters of English novelist Charles Dickens. "Plotted with manic fervour, executed with exhilarating dexterity at breakneck speed," according to Colin Greenland in the Times Literary Supplement, "The Anubis Gates is a virtuoso performance, a display of marvelous fireworks that illuminates everything in flashes, with scant afterglow."

Powers followed The Anubis Gates with Dinner at Deviant's Palace, a post-nuclear-holocaust fantasy set in Los Angeles. The novel centers on a powerful "psychic vampire"—commandant of the foul nightclub Deviant's Palace—and his followers, who brainwash Los Angeles inhabitants and seize control of the entire city. Gregorio Rivas is a "redeemer," a member of a group out to reclaim the city, who sets out to save his former lover from the cult's sinister grasp. He barely escapes with his life after he encounters its alien, bloodthirsty demon leader. Radioactive wastelands and monstrous creatures, along with dark, underworld characters and spirits, round out the fantastic elements of Dinner at Deviant's Palace.

With his imaginative On Stranger Tides, Powers returned to historical fantasy. This novel traces the highsea adventures of eighteenth-century fortune-seeker John Chandagnac. While traveling to the West Indies on a mission to retrieve his father's stolen inheritance, Chandagnac is shanghaied by the notorious pirate Blackbeard—now plagued with voodoo ghosts—and forced to join his band of zombie pirates. Also captured is a sorcerer with a fixation for matriarchs, and a crazed widower who totes his wife's severed head in a box. With Chandagnac serving as their gourmet chef, this motley crew ventures through the Caribbean and to a treacherous Florida swamp in search of the legendary Fountain of Youth. Their swashbuckling adventures lead to encounters with ghosts, beach-strolling corpses, dancing dead chickens, animated plants, and finally to a watery reservoir used to resurrect the dead. "Tim Powers has written across the entire range of the literature of the fantastic," declared Orson Scott Card in his Washington Post Book World review, "but he is at his best when writing gonzo historical novels … like On Stranger Tides."

Powers's 1989 historical fantasy The Stress of Her Regard also takes place against a backdrop of dark, supernatural, and mythical phenomenon. Set in 1815, the novel revolves around physician Michael Crawford and his relationship with the nephelim, or demonic vampire lovers. Blamed for his bride's violent murder—she was actually mutilated by Crawford's jealous demon lover—and hunted by his wife's schizophrenic twin sister, Crawford flees to London, where he encounters the great romantic poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, all of whom are engrossed with the supernatural nephelim underworld and creatively inspired by their own demonic muses. Chillingly haunted by his fiendish muse, Crawford endures supernatural battles and schemes. Ultimately, in a high-altitude confrontation with the Egyptian sphinx, both Byron and Crawford are released from the affections of their evil lovers.

Many critics pronounced The Stress of Her Regard a fascinating work conveying a fantastic story behind romanticism. Howard Mittelmark in the WashingtonPost Book World called the novel an "ingenious tale of erotic love and supernatural conspiracies," but conceded that the narrative line falters under Powers's complex mythological web. The Stress of Her Regard "is immensely clever stuff…. Powers's prose is often vivid and arresting," the critic continued, "but ultimately it is all too much." Although Sue Martin, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review found The Stress of Her Regard a trifle lengthy, she thought the novel a "shining example" of Powers's strengths—his originality, his action-crammed plots, and his ventures into the mysterious, dark, and supernatural. "All in all," the critic added, "Powers' unique voice in science fiction continues to grow stronger."

Powers' voice was heard again in 1992 with another highly regarded novel, Last Call. Against the backdrop of a Las Vegas where humans and spirits commune casually, one-eyed gambler Scott Crane teams up with the ghost of gangster Bugsy Siegel. Siegel, who wields ultimate power in "Sin City," is the target of would-be usurpers, including Georges Leon, who himself is challenged by his long-missing son, Crane. The competition hinges on a card game called Assumption; "with its recurring Tarot-card symbols, fantastic creatures … and poetic epigraphs," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, Last Call "is not an easy read; it is, however, distinctive and commanding." In a Library Journal review, Denise Dumars listed Last Call along with such modern classics as The Handmaid's Tale and Flowers for Algernon as ideal books with which to introduce readers to science fiction.

A playful spirit also characterizes Expiration Date, which is set among a group of southern California addicts. The twist is that the addicts are not attracted to drugs or alcohol, but to ghosts. In fact, the spirits of the dead are given new life when inhaled by the living, who get a "rush" from the flood of memories released by the deceased. All this provides a good business for hobo-turned-spirit-pusher Sherman Oaks. When a runaway preteen inhales the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, "a feeding frenzy begins among West Coast ghost eaters eager to absorb the great inventor's genius," according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who praised the novel for its "minefield of exploding surprises." To Carl Hays, writing in Booklist, Powers' brand of quirky otherworldliness "may baffle fans of more conventional fantasy, but his colorful characters and delightful sense of the absurd should continue to attract new readers."

In his thriller Declare, Powers mixes speculative fiction with a touch of the supernatural. Set against the backdrop of the cold war, the book opens in 1963, with agent Andrew Hale summoned by British Intelligence to finish a mission begun in Turkey many years earlier. The mission involves a trip to Mount Ararat, the purported final resting point of Noah's Ark, which Hale believed has become the sanctuary of djinns, bloodthirsty supernatural beings that can take the form of humans. The Soviet Union is being protected by one of those djinns, in the guise of an elderly woman; if this being is allowed to make contact with other djinns, chaos could result. "As in Powers's previous novels," observed National Review critic Lawrence Person, "fictional events are intertwined with meticulously researched historical fact." A Publishers Weekly writer thought that the author's integration of spy fiction and sci-fi "simply do not blend," but also cited Declare as "offbeat and daringly imaginative." Person found the novel "a worthy addition to the genre" of Christian fiction, which incorporates spiritual matters into a conventional plot. To Library Journal critic Devon Thomas, fans of such spy plotters as John LeCarre "will appreciate the authentic period detail" of Declare.

Three Days to Never, "another topnotch supernatural spy thriller," according to a Publishers Weekly critic, centers on the hunt for a time machine invented by Albert Einstein. Professor Frank Marrity, Einstein's great-grandson, and his daughter find themselves involved in a desperate search for the device. Also searching for it are operatives from Israel's Mossad, members of a secret Gnostic sect, and a blind assassin who can only see through another's eyes. Three Days to Never contains "all the landmarks of Powersland to steer by: multiple story … lines, heavy-duty plotting and characterization, the gritty and the fabulist chockablock, uncanny blends of cerebral invention and breakneck action, abrupt shifts in perception, casual use of ritual magic," remarked James Sallis in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The novel "remains an astonishingly sophisticated and engrossing narrative—a powerful and truly disturbing envisioning of global conflict and the paradoxical allure of mutually assured destruction," noted a critic in Kirkus Reviews.

Writing in an entirely different vein, Powers and coauthor James P. Blaylock assume the identity of a Victorian poet named William Ashbless in two volumes as well as in a bizarre cookbook-memoir titled The Wil-liam Ashbless Memorial Cookbook. The quirkly book features such recipes as the "Can o' Beans Salad" and a protest by the poet that he is not dead. "Goofiness abounds," was the succinct assessment of a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Strange Itineraries collects nine "eccentric, label-defying" works of short fiction, including three written in collaboration with Blaylock, noted a Publishers Weekly critic. In stories like "Pat Moore" and "Fifty Cents," the author demonstrates "his trademark predilection for quirky modern ghost stories and unsettling incursions of oddness into everyday life," observed Booklist reviewer Carl Hays. According to Andrew O'Hehir, writing in Salon.com, "Powers is generally described as belonging to the tradition of Philip K. Dick; his fiction repeatedly describes people caught in alternate or multiple versions of reality, haunted by ghosts who, more often than not, turn out to be their own." O'Hehir added that the author "is unafraid of the supernatural and even the spiritual dimension; even in SF and fantasy, to venture into such speculative arenas is to risk marginalization." As Powers told David Weich for Powells.com, "I've never seen a clear border between science fiction and fantasy. Or even horror, if they mean supernatural, as opposed to meaning just bloody hatchets and eyeballs on corkscrews, things like that. I figure I'm writing stuff under the umbrella—Bradbury, Heinlein, Lovecraft—and I never divvy it any finer than that."

Set in Los Angeles, Powers' novella A Soul in a Bottle concerns George Sydney, a used-book dealer who discovers a signed first edition of poems that contains a previously unknown sonnet. Though Sydney learns that he has the power to summon poet Cheyenne Fleming from the dead, he is also warned that his actions could endanger the life of an innocent. "There isn't a great deal of character introspection, but you know these characters from the first moment they step on stage," observed Charles de Lint in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. "And when the Lady or the Tiger moment comes, Powers doesn't reveal the character's choice, only that he makes one." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly described the "impact" of the tale as "more moral than visceral, evoking the pity and fear that are hallmarks of tragedy."

In an essay for the St. James Guide to Science-Fiction Writers, Bernadette Lynn Bosky suggested that "it may be impossible to convey fully the elaborate and coherent weirdness of a novel by Tim Powers…. Especially in the later novels, all this is conveyed in an assured prose, with a range of tones both humorous and serious, generally transparent but marked by strong descriptions and striking metaphors. Still not as well known as he should be," Bosky concluded, "Powers gets greater acclaim with each novel, and deservedly so."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Joyce, Tom, and Christopher P. Stephens, A Checklist of Tim Powers, Ultramarine (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY), 1991.

St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1996, Carl Hays, review of Expiration Date, p. 799; September 1, 2005, Carl Hays, review of Strange Itineraries, p. 75; June 1, 2006, Ian Chipman, review of Three Days to Never, p. 50.

Bookwatch, April 1, 2004, James A. Cox, review of Powers of Two, p. 8.

Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2006, review of Three Days to Never, p. 598.

Library Journal, September 15, 1997, review of Earthquake Weather, p. 106; November 15, 2000, Devon Thomas, review of Declare, p. 97; August, 2001, Denise Dumars, review of Last Call, p. 196; July 1, 2006, David Keymer, review of Three Days to Never, p. 71.

Locus, May, 1985, "Tim Powers: Ten Years a Pro"; June, 1986, "Tim Powers: Awards, but No Credit"; January, 1994, "Tim Powers: Joke Booths on the Way In"; February, 2002, Charles N. Brown, "Tim Powers: The Physics of Fantasy."

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 27, 1989, Sue Martin, review of The Stress of Her Regard, p. 12.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1, 2007, Charles de Lint, review of A Soul in a Bottle, p. 41; May 1, 2007, James Sallis, review of Three Days to Never, p. 58.

National Review, September 17, 2001, Lawrence Person, review of Declare.

Publishers Weekly, February 24, 1992, review of Last Call, p. 47; December 18, 1995 review of Expiration Date, p. 44; November 27, 2000, review of Declare, p. 51; December 18, 2000, review of Night Moves and Other Stories, p. 60; May 28, 2001, review of Dinner at Deviant's Palace, p. 56; February 11, 2002, review of The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook, p. 167; July 25, 2005, review of Strange Itineraries, p. 53; June 5, 2006, review of Three Days to Never, p. 32; October 16, 2006, review of A Soul in a Bottle, p. 39.

Times Literary Supplement, July 5, 1987, Colin Greenland, review of The Anubis Gates, p. 757.

Voice of Youth Advocates, April 1, 1998, review of Earthquake Weather, p. 58.

Washington Post Book World, October 25, 1987, Orson Scott Card, review of On Stranger Tides, p. 6; November 26, 1989, Howard Mittelmark, review of The Stress of Her Regard, p. 6.