Book Review | Medusa's Web by Tim Powers

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby south of Sunset lives, he cannot pry his sister away from this old house that is a conduit for the supernatural. 

Decorated by bits salvaged from old hotels and movie sets, Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars. A collection of hypnotic abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time—to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. 

As Madeline falls more completely under Caveat's spell, Scott must fight to protect her. But will he unravel the mystery of the Madden family's past and finally free them... or be pulled deeper into their deadly web?

***

Damn near a decade since his last standalone, two-time Philip K. Dick Award winner Tim Powers paints a characteristically trippy picture of modern Hollywood in Medusa's Web, a tense time-travel thriller about addiction and the fault lines that families straddle. 

The far-from-happy family at the heart of this narrative are the Maddens, under ancient Aunt Amity—a half-mad matriarch and erstwhile author who owns the deteriorating estate where the bulk of Powers' tale takes place:

Madeline had moved out of Caveat seven years ago, leaving her aunt with Ariel and Claimayne and the solitary writing of her endless unpublishable novels. Scott had left six years before that, to get married, though when that Louise woman left him he hadn't moved back in. (p.58)

Neither Madeline, an astrologer, nor Scott, an artist, had planned to come back to the moldering mansion they left so long ago, but Amity Madden's explosive suicide necessitates a reassessment. Her hastily-written last will stipulates that this house in the Hills is theirs to do what they want with if they can stomach spending a week within its walls—so home they go, much to Ariel and Claimayne's dismay.

Although Caveat has certainly seen better days, Ariel and Claimayne see it as their hard-earned inheritance. Understandably, then, they do everything in their power to drive Scott and Madeline away... until the same secret that tore the Maddens apart to start—a stash of so-called "spiders"—resurfaces, endangering everyone in the property in the process.

Guest Post | "Taverns Measureless to Man" by Tim Powers

To mark the paperback publication of his newest book, Hide Me Among the Graves — a sequel of sorts to his classic 1989 novel The Stress of Her Regard which has been described as "Dickens as directed by David Lynch" — in addition to the re-release last week of Last Call as one of Gollancz's new-fangled Fantasy Masterworks, it's my pleasure to welcome the one and only Tim Powers to The Speculative Scotsman, to talk about nothing less momentous than how steampunk started.

***

If you ever find yourself thirsty in Orange, California, you could do worse than to stop in at a place near the Orange Circle called O'Hara's Pub and order a pitcher of beer. Sit at one of the booths right across from the bar, and you're right where Steampunk started in about 1976.

Of course lots of books that we now recognize as Steampunk were published before that — Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! and Michael Moorcock's Warlord of the Air, and Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium, to name just three — but it was K. W. Jeter who coined the term that made the subgenre distinct, and Jeter was sitting in that booth in '76, along with James Blaylock and me.

The three of us were, or had recently been, English majors at a local college, and all three of us wanted to write science fiction and fantasy books. Jeter and I had in fact recently sold novels to a very low-paying publisher called Laser Books, and my own plan had been to go on writing books for Laser and live on two-thousand dollars a year... but Laser folded, and the three of us were left to while away the afternoons over endless pitchers of beer at O'Hara's.

Mornings too — I remember standing with Blaylock outside of O'Hara's before the place opened, and quoting Omar Khayyam:

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before

The Tavern shouted - "Open then the Door!

"You know how little while we have to stay,

"And, once departed, may return no more."

And I'm sure I quoted Coleridge about passing "through taverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea."

But luckily Laser had not been the only light that failed — the editor at Laser had told us that a British publisher wanted a series of novels based on the idea of King Arthur being reincarnated over the centuries to save the West from various catastrophes, and we had got busy writing them — but eventually the British publisher had become disenchanted with the notion, and all three of us were left with books about reincarnated King Arthur and no publisher.

Jeter, fortunately for us all, had chosen Victorian England as the setting for one of his — Morlock Night, which was eventually published in 1979 — and he found, and told Blaylock and I about, Henry Mayhew. Mayhew was a journalist who wrote in painstaking detail about the lives of all sorts of poor people in Victorian London, honest and crooked, and two collections of his work, Mayhew's London and London's Underworld, were in print. Presented with such a near-infinite source of research details, all three of us proceeded to write science fiction and/or fantasy novels set in 19th century London. And we managed to sell them.

I believe Blaylock had actually seen London, if briefly; Jeter and I had not. And all three of us were writing about a London that existed more in our heads than it ever had in reality, largely derived from Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. The books we wrote about it are now three decades old, and I must admit I look back at them, and the times in which we wrote them, with fondness. And when Jeter, Blaylock and I are sometimes credited with having started Steampunk, I politely don't argue.

***

Thank you a thousand times for the insight into steampunk's early years, Tim, and for taking the time to stop off at The Speculative Scotsman.

If you're looking for more from the man, then to begin with there are his books — every one of which I've read I'd recommend — but be aware, as well, that "Taverns Measureless to Man" is just the latest in a line of great guest posts he's put together for a few of my favourite blogs, including Fantasy Book Critic, Falcata Times, A Fantastical Librarian, SF Signal, Civilian Reader and Fantasy Book Review.

Plus he'll be propping up Pornokitsch all of next week, I believe.

Book Review | Three Days to Never by Tim Powers

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When Albert Einstein told Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 that the atomic bomb was possible, he did not tell the president about another discovery he had made, something so extreme and horrific it remained a secret... until now. This extraordinary new novel from one of the most brilliant talents in contemporary fiction is a stand-out literary thriller in which one man stumbles upon the discovery Einstein himself tried to keep hidden.

When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure from her grandmother's house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank Marrity, has any idea that the theft has drawn the attention of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists — or that within hours they'll be visited by her long-lost grandfather, who is also desperate to get that tape. And when Daphne's teddy bear is stolen, a blind assassin nearly kills Frank, and a phantom begins to speak to her from a switched-off television set, Daphne and her father find themselves caught in the middle of a murderous power struggle that originated long ago in Israel and Germany but now crashes through Los Angeles and out to the Mojave Desert.

To survive, they must quickly learn the rules of a dangerous magical chess game and use all their cleverness and courage - as well as their love and loyalty to each other - to escape a fate more profound than death.

***

Tim Powers is known for a number of notable genre novels, including the Locus and World Fantasy Award-winning Last Call, The Stress of Her Regard and its recent sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, the so-called "inspiration" for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean affair. For all these, though, it's fair to say The Anubis Gates remains his most famous. Despite the critical and commercial success of the books above and beyond, nothing the acclaimed American author has written in the nearly 40 years of his career has caught on quite like that classic time travel narrative, so to see Powers return to this well-trodden trope is at once predictable and auspicious.

Three Days to Never isn't a new novel, strictly speaking - it was published in the United States in 2006 - nevertheless, it's new to me, as it will be to other readers who've had to wait for its belated British release this week. But better late than never, certainly — and that goes for those of you who missed it when it was new, too.

Considering the complexities of its exhilarating endgame, the beginning of Three Days to Never is suspiciously simple. I wouldn't go so far as to suggest the story starts slowly, but it does take Powers an age to explain the narrative's core conceit, which has our central characters inherit an improvised time machine following the puzzling passing of a batty granny with secret ties, it transpires, to both Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein.

That it takes the entire first act for Frank and Daphne Marrity to figure out even this little is an issue, admittedly, but not as big a one as it might have been, thanks in large part to Powers' protagonists: a deeply endearing father and daughter double-act who keep Three Days to Never interesting during the opening doldrums, and ground the narrative's especially incredible aspects afterwards. To be sure, they're a precocious pair, yet Frank and Daphne must be amongst the most charming characters the author has created to date.

To balance out the great equation, Powers provides two superficially fascinating antagonists, each of whom represents an outside interest in Frank and Daphne's magical swastika.

Wait, had I not mentioned the magical swastika?

Well... now you know.

Oren Lepidopt, however, knows more. In fact, after a close encounter with a holy wall in Jordan, Lepidopt knows certain things with absolute, unearthly certainty: he knows, for instance, that he'll never again hear the name John Wayne. He knows he'll never eat another tuna sandwich, or swim in the sea, or pet a cat, or see a film in the cinema. About the only thing he isn't sure of is how to safely extract the aforementioned artefact.

And the Mossad aren't the only organisation with designs on Grammar's golden swastika. There's also the Vespers:

"A secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-century natural philosophers Languedoc whose discoveries in the areas of time and so-called reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic church that Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be wiped out [thinking they] had rediscovered the real Holy Grail." (pp.76-77)

Blind since a nasty accident, yet still able to see through the eyes of anyone within a particular radius around her, Charlotte Sinclair epitomises the occult orientation of this secret society — that is as opposed to the Mossad's more spiritual principles. Haunted, if not necessarily daunted by the terrible things she's done, Charlotte hopes to travel back in time to undo all the wretchedness she's wrought... but her bosses have different ideas.

Charlotte and Lepidopt are fantastic characters in concept, and they do come into their own eventually, but  again, it takes too long, meanwhile the many others members of their respective groups feel faceless; excuses to infodump outside of the central thread, at best. Unfortunately this is not uncommon in Three Days to Never: Powers frequently interrupts the momentum of Frank and Daphne's comparatively fast-paced chapters to explain, in dizzying detail, what just happened — in addition to why and how and, tellingly, when.

So it starts uncertainly, and suffers from some dreadful talking heads, but take heart, genre fiction fans, because said sequences are the exception rather than the rule, and the whole thing finishes with a phenomenal flourish. Between these extremes, Three Days to Never is as thrilling as anything Tim Powers has written. There's espionage, obviously, and a neat take on time travel, but winningly, the tale also takes in physics and history, philosophy and literature.

Not all of these ideas succeed, indeed; together, however, the few which do trump the entire contents of three normal novels. Even if Three Days to Never can't quite exceed the high bar set by the author's most memorable other efforts - sadly, this isn't the second coming of The Anubis Gates - it is still a solid slab of smart, supernatural sci-fi, well worth looking into whether it's new to you or not.

***

Three Days to Never

by Tim Power

UK Publication: January 2013, Corvus

US Publication: November 2007, Harper

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Book Review | On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

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1718: Puppeteer John Chandagnac has set sail for Jamaica to recover his stolen inheritance, when his ship is seized by pirates. Offered the choice to join the crew, or be killed where he stands, he decides that a pirate's life is better than none at all. Now known as Jack Shandy, this apprentice buccaneer soon learns to handle a mainsail and wield a cutlass - only to discover he is now a subject of a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by one Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard. A practitioner of voodoo, Blackbeard is building an army of the living and the dead, to voyage together to dreamlike lands where the Fountain of Youth awaits...

***

The basis for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film set to hit theatres this May, On Stranger Tides by Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominee Tim Powers is a drunken, back-stabbing, swaggering, double-dealing Saturday afternoon in the sun matinee of a novel. Depending on how closely Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio's adapted screenplay hones to it, and just how many Captain Jack Sparrows director Rob Marshall decides to composite into the thing, needless to say, in On Stranger Tides there are the makings of the best Pirates of the Carribean flick since the very first.


Nor is this the first time On Stranger Tides has been the inspiration for such estimable entertainment. Originally released in 1987, way back when Powers' novel also moved game designer and erstwhile funny man Ron Gilbert to define a generation with The Secret of Monkey Island. Their purposes might have differed somewhat - one was a boisterous book of adventure on the high seas and the other a comic point-and-click - but the veins of commonality between the game and the story which helped germinate it are easy to pick out, even to this day: there's all the voodoo hoodoo, of course, but also strains of Hatch and Shandy in LeChuck and Guybrush, and in the pirate town of Mêlée, where Threepwood determines to become a swarvy dog, there are echoes of "the outlaw republic on New Providence Island" (p.57) where Powers' protagonist Jack gets sea legs of his own.


This is after he's been pressganged, you understand. While sailing for Jamaica to right a wrong done him by an ass-kissing uncle and inherit the estate that is rightfully his, John Chandagnac's ship is boarded by pirates under the nefarious Blackbeard, who give him a no-brainer of a choice: John can either walk the plank, or join them. He signs on the dotted line forthwith - wouldn't we all? - and rechristened Jack Shandy via a few drunken sailors and a barrel of rum, he begins to realise that perhaps it's a pirate's life for him, after all... if only for as long as it takes to rescue the object of his affections.


That's Beth Hurwood, in whose body Beth's father Benjamin means to resurrect his late and oft-lamented wife. Beth is "innocence intolerably abused" (p.182) in so many words, and Jack hopes to see her free from harm's way, even if saving the girl means he has to cross Blackbeard himself, whose quest for booty takes the pirates - old and new "to a hole in the wall between life and death, and anyone standing around is liable to catch the spray from one side or the other. Don't you know any history? It what Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for - he called it the Fountain of Youth." (p.158)


Now I'm no Pirates of the Caribbean apologist. The sequels were ridiculous, self-serving things; embarrassing for all concerned, I do not doubt. But that first film... well, it took me back, reminded me of a time when pirates were in vogue, and such stories were still told. Where did they all go, anyway?


For its part, On Stranger Tides left me feeling much the same way, in a heady haze of nostalgia and satisfaction. Powers writes unfussily, with lots of hyphens and ellipses and asides, yet through every diversion his piquant prose flows smoothly. His language is intoxicating, engaging on a visual and a sensory level, and though his characters - Jack and Beth and especially Blackbeard - are archetypes every which way you look at them, they leap to life from the first. Their adventures are an undiluted joy to follow.


On Stranger Tides has it all, which is to say romance and mystery, action and intrigue, dark magic and exciting swordfights on the seven seas. It's such great fun; it rips along, keeping pace with the best best Summer books; and if I don't remember much of it in a week or a month or a year, as well I might not, why... I'll go at it again! I read this timely reissue because of the Pirates of the Caribbean connection, I admit, but the next Tim Powers I read, I'm reading because Tim Powers wrote it.


Also: arrrrrr!

***

On Stranger Tides

by Tim Powers

UK Publication: May 2011, Corvus
US Publication: April 2011, Harper


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading