Tim Powers

[stoutfellow]

I'm beginning a Tim Powers binge. I just reread The Drawing of the Dark, and I'll continue at least as far as Last Call. I don't know whether I'll go past that; Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather were major disappointments, and though Declare was a bit of a rebound, it wasn't enough to persuade me to buy anything more of his.

I have to wonder what happened. The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, and The Stress of Her Regard are outstanding, and Dinner at Deviant's Palace is pretty good, but after TSoHR he seemed to lose something. Maybe it's an editing failure; the later books seem a bit bloated. Last Call still has most of the elements of Powers' earlier works, but they don't seem to fit as smoothly as before.

I suppose that it's a coincidence that the decline occurred when he started setting stories in the twentieth century. (DaDP is post-apocalyptic, and the others lie between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries for the most part. The Anubis Gates starts in the mid-twentieth century, but doesn't stay there for long.) Maybe his characteristic mix of history, pseudo-history, and myth just doesn't hold up as well when he gets too close to the present.

Whatever. The quality of the earlier books remains, regardless of later failings.

Comments

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

It's all right, but... Let me put it this way: I would not reread it except as part of a Powers binge. The elements that he used in his best work are there, but they aren't quite integrated yet. The plotting's a little choppy; the various supernatural elements don't quite cohere; a few other minor complaints. Not a bad story, but not a great one.