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 Dick 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's 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 fervor, executed with exhilarating
dexterity at breakneck speed," lauded 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, California.
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, blood-thirsty 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 high-sea adventures
of an eighteenth-century fortune-seeking young man, 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.
Captured too is a sorcerer with a fixation for matriarchs and a crazed
widower who totes his wife's severed head in a box. With Chandagnac as
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 them 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 phenomenons. 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 intriguing, a fascinating
work conveying a fantastic story behind romanticism. Howard Mittelmark
in the Washington Post 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."
Sketch by Denise E. Kasinec Copyright 1997, Gale Research Inc. All rights reserved.
