Rated
Jul 25 2006
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1 review
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science fiction, books, tim powers
• scifi.com
An interview with Tim Powers on his new novel "Three Days to Never"
From the page:"His highly distinctive brand of fantasy--vastly complex, set in intensely realized locations, riddled with skeins of occult conspiracy and featuring protagonists whose involvement with the supernatural follows a dark perverse logic chillingly threatening to body and soul--began to take definitive shape with The Drawing of the Dark (1979), a memorable vision of King Arthur reincarnated to save Vienna from the Turkish siege of 1529.
Powers' most famous single novel, The Anubis Gates (1983), was one of its decade's most compelling adventure tales in any medium, taking a modern scholar of Romanticism back in time to his subject period, a pilgrimage entailing exchanges of bodies, visits to a fantasticated pre-Victorian London underworld and confrontations with superbly depicted sorcerous evildoers; scarcely less vivid were Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the background of a devastated future America, and On Stranger Tides (1987), a fuliginous story of Blackbeard the pirate king and lunatic questings after immortality in 18th-century Florida.
After these triumphs, Powers began to write longer, perhaps more considered but still hectically detailed and paced fantasies. The Stress of Her Regard (1989) is an astonishing take on possession, a secret history of inorganic life that explains in nightmarish terms the genius and the downfall of the great Romantic poets. The huge Fisher King trilogy followed, made up of Last Call (1992), Expiration Date (1995) and Earthquake Weather (1997); accounts of magical influences and mythic resurrections on and around America's West Coast, these books insinuate opulent levels of strangeness beneath modern America's veil of normality, to bizarre and potently subversive effect. The mystical underbelly of the 20th century is unveiled with especial virtuosity in Declare (2000), in which djinni and arcane rituals put a rather unaccustomed complexion on the Cold War, and Cold War and Californian concerns mingle cogently in Powers' latest novel, Three Days to Never, published in August 2006 by William Morrow and, in a lavish limited edition, by Subterranean Press.
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Tim Powers in June 2006, concentrating on Three Days to Never and his short fiction, collected in Strange Itineraries (Tachyon 2005)."