The Power of Powers

Last month I got these four volumes from my Wish List and spent a wondrous week reading them. I had been unable to catch up on my Tim Powers for some time (first from financial hardship, then because of some higher book priorities – though these were pretty high themselves) and was eager to do so. Alas! Perhaps too eager.

I got the sequel Forced Perspectives two days before the original ‘Vickery and Castine’ book Alternate Routes and like a fool I had – HAD! – to read it first. I enjoyed it very much. So when I came to Alternate Routes (an ex-library copy) I had a fairly good idea of who would live and who would die. This to some degree tempered my enjoyment and anticipation; not terribly much, but some. Perhaps with the passage of time when I come to a second reading, I will be able to see it again on its own and not as a ‘prequel’.

The Properties of Rooftop Air returns to the world of The Anubis Gates and further explores the evil Horrabin and his magical criminal underworld through the adventures of Isaac Fairchild, a dimwitted beggar that the malevolent clown chooses for one of his occult experiments. A slender little book, more of a short story than a novella, really.

Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers is a lovely gathering of many of Powers’ short stories and novellas and renders unnecessary my hunting of several separate books. I am not sure of it, but I have the impression that there is a second volume coming. Also makes moot the necessity of several other volumes (I may mention Strange Itineraries, I think) that I already have.

For more info on these books, see elsewhere in this blog under “Powers” and “Items from the Wish List”.