Tag: tim powers

Book of the Week: The Anubis Gates.

Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates is one of the best time travel novels ever written. I don’t say that sort of thing lightly. What makes it stand above most of the rest of this particular genre is in Powers’ uncanny ability to find hollowed-out places in the historical records where one is able to pour in a story or three. You are left with the sense that while things might not have turned out the way that he portrayed them (usually a safe bet, since he writes fantasy novels), but they should have turned out that way and there’s no way to disprove it now anyway. This was the first one of his that I read, and I’ve been buying Tim Powers on sight ever since.

And so, adieu to Carter and Lovecraft.

Book of the Week: Medusa’s Web.

I could have sworn that I did Tim Powers’ Medusa’s Web last week, or something; but I can’t find it on the Book of the Week list. Anyway, just started it today, and it’s Powers, so I figure it’s safe to put it up now. So far it seems to be about time travel and madness, which is always a plus.

And so, adieu to …Tim Powers’ Last Call.  Must be why I thought that I had done Medusa’s Web already.

Book of the Week: Last Call.

Tim Powers is always a reliable person to read, of course: and Last Call is undoubtedly the go-to book if you ever want to read about how Las Vegas, poker, the Tarot, Bugsy Siegel and the Fisher King are related.  …And if you never realized that you wanted to read about all of that, well, today’s your lucky day.

 

And so, adieu to The Awesome.

Book of the Week: Declare.

Declare is a novel by Tim Powers, and like pretty much all Tim Powers novels it manages to create a unique subgenre that nonetheless makes perfect sense when you think about it.  Of course, you say. Clearly I wanted to read a book that integrates Abrahamic religious lore with classic Cold War spy fiction. Silly of me not to realize this sooner, in fact.

Tim Powers does this all the time. I just buy his books on sight now. It saves valuable time.

And so, adieu to Atomic Robo Volume 7: Flying She-Devils of the Pacific.  And the rest of them, too.

Moe Lane

PotC: ON STRANGER TIDES trailer!

So, I told myself that I wasn’t going to get sucked into going to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

But then they did this:

Yup.  They really and truly did throw some money at Tim Powers.  Which means that the original On Stranger Tides – WHICH IS THE BEST DAMN VOODOO PIRATE ADVENTURE NOVEL EVER WRITTEN – will almost certainly be re-released as the ‘novelization,’ which will put more money in Tim Powers’ pockets, and I hope to God that the man has an agent with the mother-wit to say the magic phrase ‘percentage of the gross,’ because while there are better things to do with one’s money than to give some of it to Tim Powers, the list is not exhaustive.

So.  Yeah, yeah, I kind of have to go see this movie now.

Via Nodwick.

Book of the Week: Liberating Atlantis.

As it is Sunday, we shall now switch out On Stranger Tides for Harry Turtledove’s Liberating Atlantis. It’s the third book of an alternate history series where the eastern half of the North American continent (named Atlantis by the inhabitants) had apparently been detached millions of years previously and more or less parked in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The previous two books highlighted the alternate’s version of the Age of Discovery and the American Revolution; this one looks to address Atlantis’ version of the American Civil War.

Or you could just buy it because it’s by Harry Turtledove. I find that to be a remarkably successful book-buying strategy.

Moe Lane

Pirates of the Caribbean 4: I don’t know what to think. Seriously.

I mean, when I read that the chance of it happening may have been wrecked by Dick Cook getting fired (Disney muckety-muck), I was relieved. I was very disappointed by the second and third movies (the first, of course, rocked on toast). And heck: I didn’t even know that they were planning to make a fourth film.

But then I read the working title.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

On. Stranger. Tides.

As the Onion AV Club noted:

A 1988 Tim Powers novel called On Stranger Tides concernes pirates, a character called Jack, and the search for the Fountain Of Youth. And as POTC fans may recall, Jack and Barbosa ended At World’s End hinting that they planned to get their Ponce de Leon on. A compass couldn’t point us in a straighter direction.

So now I’m stuck.  Johnny Depp starring in a reboot of a franchise that takes its plot from a FREAKING TIM POWERS NOVEL.  There will be nothing mediocre about the result: it will reach Iron Man / Star Trek levels of awesomeness, or it will suck utterly.  There can be no middle ground.