So, I stopped by Junior Ganymede, as is my wont, and read the latest post: "The Taste is Bitter in My Mouth" -- a brief post which includes the line "Yesterday I found a Tim Powers book I hadn’t read yet." I realized that I have absolutely no idea who Tim Powers is or what sort of books he writes.
Then, acting on a very uncharacteristic whim, I clicked more or less at random on one of the links on the JG blogroll: labelled "Common sense? What's that?" but directing to a blog called "Yet another weird SF fan." Then, even though the first several posts on the page were topical birdemic-related stuff that completely failed to pique my interest, I kept scrolling down to a January 1 post called "Analogs of Donald Trump in Science Fiction." It had a link, which I clicked on, to a bit in Scott Alexander's Unsong about how The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is about the 2016 election. (I think I had read it before, back in 2017 when it was first posted.) This ended with a link to a "new author's note," which I also dutifully clicked on. This "note" turned out to little more than a lightly annotated assortment of vaguely-related links, only one of which elicited a click: "Where has all the magic gone?" by someone called Jaskologist.
The first sentence in this Jaskologist post (all I've read of it so far): "If you’ve never read a Tim Powers book, go do yourself a favor and check out The Anubis Gates, which ranks in my top 3 favorite works of fiction."
To the best of my knowledge, I had never encountered the name Tim Powers before today -- or if I had, it didn't register. If you had asked me an hour ago who Tim Powers was, I wouldn't even have been able to tell you that he was a writer as opposed to a football player, an actor, or a physicist. I still know nothing about him except that he apparently writes fiction and that two of his books are called Salvage and Demolition and The Anubis Gates. Anyway, it seems pretty clear that the synchronicity fairies are trying to bring him to my attention.
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6 comments:
TP crops up a lot in PKD's biography, since they were best friends; and he appears in Valis as a character. He seems like a thoroughly decent chap, and a much-needed good influence on PKD - he was/is a serious Roman Catholic.
Bruce, have you read anything by Powers? Is there anything you'd recommend?
No I haven't, so far. I rather liked the sound of that Anubis Gates one.
I enjoyed The Anubis Gates.
Time travel is only rarely possible. When an esoteric but well-connected researcher discovers a gate between an imminent day in contemporary London and a certain day in the early nineteenth century on which Samuel Taylor Coleridge is known to have given a public lecture, he raises ten million dollars from a select group of subscribers, enough to hire horses and carriages and respectable clothing with pockets full of gold sovereigns, and also to employ an impecunious university lecturer in the literature of English Romanticism to be their tour guide.
If you can get overthe implausibility of a dozen millionaires caring about Coleridge, it's a great yarn. But before you get your hopes up: we don't actually get to meet Coleridge. There is a setback, and our young lecturer ends up stranded and has to make his own way in Georgian London.
I've started reading The Anubis Gates. I'm about a third of the way through, and so far it's fantastic. And we do in fact get to meet Coleridge, if only briefly.
I've loved everything by TP. I guess "Last Call" and "Expiration Date" are my favorites.
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