Posted by
Icarus on Monday, January 01, 2007 12:19:57 AM
My hope for A Fallen Icarus is to have a gathering place for conservatives who are also fans of fantasy, science fiction and horror, and who enjoy those genres in just about every medium there is: film, novels, comic books and television.
That being said, if you are a fantasy and weird fiction fan, then you must read Tim Powers. His works are nothing short of amazing. There is a website,
TheWorksofTimPowers.com, devoted to the works of Tim Powers, obviously.
I started with his novel
The Anubis Gates, then
Declare, after which I read
Dinner at Deviant's Place. From there I devored
Expiration Date and have just started the World Fantasy Award winning book
Last Call. Following this book I will move on to
Earthquake Weather. I should point out that Last Call, Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather make up a loose trilogy, in the order just listed. These three books share some characters, but, having just finished the "trilogy's" second book and about 100 pages into the first, they are not cliffhangers. Also waiting on my desk are his short story collection,
Strange Itineraries, a collection of Powers' short stories, and
The Drawing of the Dark, a novel in which beer seems to play a significant role in saving Western Civilization from invading Turkish armies.
Tim Powers is an amazing writer who happens to be Catholic. Powers' ability to get into his character's souls is what attracts me to these books. The conflicts they face threaten both their physical and spiritual wellbeing. One also finds in Powers' books easy reference to a character's faith without a story every becoming preachy. He notes, in
this interview at IngatiusInsight.com, "
The main point of fantasy should be ... to excite the numinous,
vertiginous effects of real supernatural events actually occurring. Any
other purpose – to comment on feminism, or racism, or abortion, or
the war in Iraq, or whatever the new issue of Newsweek provides –
cripples that main point." It is a shame that so many authors fail to understand this point.
I hope this post entices a few Townhall.com readers to pick up a Tim Powers book. His books are not the easiest works to read. For example there is a sequence in Expiration Date that includes a very detailed description of making a 'psychic' telephone using chalk, instead of a magnet, as the central element in a speaker. That being said I think they are well worth the effort and may just make a fantasy or science fiction fan out of someone who thought those genres were the poor second cousin to "real" literature.