Science fiction and fantasy author Tim Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his novels Last Call and Declare , and he won the Philip K. Dick Award for The Anubis Gates. Specializing in “secret histories,” Powers bases his works on historical events and biographies of famous people, with the idea that occult or supernatural factors heavily influenced those people and events. 

In addition to writing, Powers also teaches part-time as writer in residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer’s workshop.

This interview was conducted at Philcon, where he was the keynote speaker in November 2008.

I’d like to start by picking up on some of the things you spoke about in your keynote address. You were speaking about how science fiction is almost at a perpendicular plane to mainstream fiction. Could you tell me how that applies to your own work, that definition?

Yes. I would say that mainstream — and it might be a 20th Century development — has become limited to what could really happen. And I think it’s 20th Century development, because in Dickens, you’ll get a mainstream book like Oliver Twist or Bleak House which will just casually include a ghost or spontaneous combustion. Or some other occult semi-SiFi-type incident. […] “Christmas Carol,” of course, is an extreme example, but it doesn’t seem to have excluded it into a separate category in those days. And I think, in the 20th Century, mainstream has become restricted to what could really happen.

And the definition of what could happen is more narrow, as well?

Yes. It presumes that supernatural stuff can’t happen. […] Mainstream has become restricted, maybe because the 20th Century was such an aggressively atheist century. It’s become restricted to what can naturally occur. And it strikes me that to write mainstream is to adopt a needlessly restricted toolkit. And so I would say that our stuff, the stuff that gets reviewed in Locus includes all the stuff mainstream can do but opens it up to a second dimension, as well. So we can have all the guns and TV sets and […] telephones and stuff that mainstream uses, but we also have access to a whole lot more stuff. And I think it’s, I’d say, an enrichment, except that I think it’s the basic landscape. It’s not that science fiction/fantasy has got a richer field to play in. I think that mainstream has an artificially narrowed field to play in.

Are you familiar with the term “magical realism?”

Yes. Magical realism always strikes me as […] mainstream’s anemic attempt to include the stuff [that] our stuff works with. Because somehow, in magical realism, I always get a sense that this isn’t really happening to real people in real places.

One element that always makes me think this is that, in a magical realism story, people aren’t surprised when a supernatural event intrudes. In 100 Years of Solitude, some woman’s hanging her laundry out and floats away into the sky. And it rains flower petals all night, which is a very nice effect. But it’s no big deal. And there’s no consistent structure to the magic. It just will happen.

Like a dreamland or dream logic.

Yes, exactly. It’s like a dream. And, since there’s no consistency to the magic, I don’t think we’re called on to believe this is really happening in a real world to real people. It’s kind of “let’s pretend.”

Kind of an escape.

Yes. And, of course, our stuff is escapism, but we want it to be very convincingly presented. When I’m reading a book, I really want to think, for the duration of reading it, that this is really happening to real characters.

Now, you said that you’re skeptical.

Yes.

But that you, I guess, would say, as well, you’re also open-minded. That’s the true definition of a skeptic, though. They don’t subscribe to either way of thinking. They don’t say everything [is] scientific, and they don’t say everything [is] supernatural. They’re willing to accept there’s some room to move.

Yes. I would be skeptical about ghosts right now. But if I was in a dark, old house all alone in the middle of the night, my skepticism would get a little bit threadbare.

Now, one of the things that was brought up in the panel about your work […] was your Roman Catholic background. And they felt that that informed your interest in the magical and the secret history side. And I was wondering if that’s a simplification or if you think there’s any connection.

It’s probably roughly true, in that it can’t help but affect my perspective. Certainly, as a Catholic, I think […] the supernatural can occur. I think it’s real rare, and if somebody told me it happened to them, I wouldn’t believe them. And certainly, I’d prefer that no supernatural things happen around me. But yes, it would keep me from reflexively dealing with such things at a sort of skeptical arm’s length, with the attendant possibility of kind of a patronizing, condescending, contemptuous attitude.

Because, obviously, you would believe in certain miracles and things like that.

Yes, I do. As a Catholic, there’s a number of supernatural things I believe occur, as much as I believe an atom consists of protons and electrons.

Now, another thing that they pointed out [in the panel] is there’s a timelessness to your work, because you minimize the use of contemporary pop cultural references. So if you’re writing about an historical period, you are writing about things that are contemporary to that time. But if you’re setting it in the present, somebody’s not listening to a radio, like in Stephen King, and the latest pop song is on, and then they’re watching some TV show and they’re talking about the latest sports hero. They felt that that was one of the reasons that your work was more timeless.

Well, I like that they thought it was timeless. I would say I don’t so much try to exclude such things as not give contemporary things any particular preference over more archaic things. […] I have included references to Elvis Presley, but they’re not more prominent than references to Dionysus, say. Or Edison, or Milton. In fact, I think it’s real important for writers — readers, too — to not specialize in the two-dimensional top surface of culture, because really, it should be a three-dimensional volume. And you shouldn’t be more aware of Stephen King [or] any contemporary writer than you are of Hemingway, Dickens, Defoe, Milton, Chaucer. There’s this big pile of stuff, and you shouldn’t be exclusively concentrating on the stuff that’s at the top level. Because 20 years from now, something else will be on the top level.

I think what they were talking about was really the inclination amongst some contemporary writers to use that as a way to kind of say, “Hey, I’m hip.  I’m with it.  You should read me.”

Hip and with it, I would avoid.  The trouble with “hip and with it” is you have to cut yourself off from a whole lot of really powerful stuff.  And three years from now, it won’t still be hip and with it. I would never want to be timely or relevant, because five years later, whatever you were talking about isn’t timely or relevant any more.

And I love that you put it that way, because that dovetails into another thing that came up in your talk yesterday. When you were talking about resisting the inclination that some writers have towards sociological commentary and trying to talk about what’s happening in modern culture and putting that into your work. Now, you were challenged on that by a member of the audience.

Yes. Who brought up 1984.

Yes, which is not exactly contemporary, but…

It could be [argued] that 1984 was not any kind of one-for-one commentary on something specific. Arguably, Big Brother was Stalin. Arguably, the world of 1984 was oppressively socialist government, such as was going on in the Soviet Union at the time. But I think, rather than specifically talking about Soviet Russia, it was a dystopian novel. And was really more in the general timeless impulses and problems and things that are likely to occur, than “this is a commentary on the Soviet Union.” Because if it was a commentary specifically on the Soviet Union, then today, with the Soviet Union gone, it would have only historical interest. It would be like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is historically important. It’s a crucial factor in the whole picture of slavery in the 19th century. But I don’t think anybody reads Uncle Tom’s Cabin for fun now. It’s like […] Upton Sinclair, The Jungle. I bet nobody really reads The Jungle now for fun. I bet they read it as a historical factor: “Oh, look, it revolutionized the Food and Drug Administration.”

I read 1984 in 1983, and I thought it sounded a lot like Reagan, in some ways. Because there was some of the newspeak kind of thing, like the PC kind of things that were starting to come into popularity then.

Well, ideally, that would be how it would work. Every time period would find relevance to their own. But they would never say Orwell was specifically speaking about this. And I don’t like it when any fiction, but especially our stuff clearly is talking about its own time.

Philip K. Dick comes to mind, and that’s another one that the audience brought up, and obviously, you know him and know his work very well.

Well, his book, A Scanner Darkly, was written pretty deliberately to be an anti-drug use book. But I think he was such a good writer that the concerns of the story and the plot and the characters took precedence. It did wind up being, in effect, a good anti-drug use book, but I think it’s a good book first.

To your point, it was set in the 1960s. It’s very of the 1960s, and yet it’s also something you can read now. It will always be true, because anybody you will ever know who has ever known anyone who is addicted, it is still true, no matter what time period it is.

Yes. And he didn’t do the thing I’m always leery of, which is make his characters representative of types. They were all real characters. And it’s almost incidental that they happen to be drug addicts. It doesn’t read as if the purpose of the book was to do an improving portrait of representative drug addicts.

]]> http://www.wildviolet.net/2010/04/13/interview-tim-powers/feed/ 0 http://www.wildviolet.net/2010/04/13/review-a-whales-tale/ http://www.wildviolet.net/2010/04/13/review-a-whales-tale/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:31:32 +0000 http://www.wildviolet.net/wordpress/?p=682

Combining fiction with zoological information, in A Whale’s Tale, Daniel S. Janik explores the undersea world of the Pacific Humpback whale. The book is described on the back as a “Read-Aloud, Color-Me-Please Book.”  It follows a particular whale from his birth until he begins his own family.

The idea for this book is a noble one: to interest children in the natural world through a character with whom they can identify. The narrative, however, could pose problems for young readers, whether they’re reading it themselves or listening to an adult. Some of the vocabulary, for example, such as “inseparable” or “increasingly tolerant” might be above them. More problematic, though, is the structure. At the beginning of the tale, it is unclear who is speaking, but it turns out to be the whale who would eventually become the young humpback’s mate. It would have been better to tell the whole tale from the main character’s perspective.

Since the story is told from a whale’s point of view, it downplays scientific terminology and describes things from a sensory perspective. For example, it describes the phenomenon known as “bubble net feeding,” where whales combine forces to blow bubbles around small fish, which then confine the animals in a small area where they can easily be scooped up. However, for young people unfamiliar with this technique, an appendix or a sidebar describing the process in clear terms would have helped.

Ruth Janik contributed the illustrations, and her cover art is beautiful. It’s too bad the interior art could not also be produced in color. In addition to featuring the central characters, the book also includes other sea life, including an incongruous mermaid. Since these other fish and sea creatures are not mentioned in the story, a caption containing some information about them would have added to the learning experience.

While this story may interest children initially, there is little action aside from migration and feeding, so that might discourage repeated readings.  Still, any tale that  could help young readers appreciate the environment should be lauded, if for that spirit alone.

Rating: ** (2 out of 4 stars)

Savant Books and Publications, 2009; ISBN 1442105062

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the author.

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As he writes in the poem “The Calm Clam,” poet Changming Yuan yearns “to be a voice empowered / For all around me.” In his collection, Chansons of a Chinaman, he strives “To translate my loud pain / Into a muted pearl,” to reconcile his Chinese ancestry and his American life.

To do so, Yuan, whose work has appeared in Wild Violet, draws from history, mythology and natural imagery. In natural images he finds personal comfort and resonance, as demonstrated in the poem “Name Changing.” Here, he defends his choice not to Anglicize his name, which his parents created by “rearranging the sun and moon / vertically and horizontally” to give the name a balanced power. In the final stanza, he writes:

But to retain the subtle balances
In the wild wild world I wander
To hold my father’s sunbeam
With my mother’s moonlight
I fiercely refuse to change it.

In “Passengers” he turns racism on its ear, drawing power from his difference. He begins the poem with a litany of societal assumptions: “I speak aloud in tongue / I eat noisily with bamboo sticks / I appear everywhere like locusts” and then addresses directly those who might fear or even despise him for his “otherness”:

You can feel my Chinky shadow
Until we touch down
My breaths will invade
Your private space
My chanting will beat your eardrums
While you pursue your dream

Finally, he casts away such fears, saying, “I am not a phoenix / No more or less than a fellow traveler / With my own destination”. In the final lines, he calls for togetherness and understanding to replace fear and distrust: “So, feel free to do whatever comforts you / We will travel together”.

In the final section of the book, Yuan travels to China to seek out connections between his family history, his life today, and the legacy he will pass to his son. Once more, he finds inspiration and comfort in the natural world. In “Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River,” he personifies the river as a toothless ancient one with “brownish wrinkles” whose “love for the Loess Plateau often overturns and overflows”. Although the river’s course is “crowded with holes and crevices”, Yuan finds hope within the river’s perpetual flow:

You may be tortured or burned to steam
But you will eventually find your impossible way
                                To the sea of blue sky

While occasionally prone to melodrama, for the most part, Yuan’s collection serves as a sort of guidebook: a translation between cultures, a nexus between past and present. In his best poems, Yuan’s work marries mythology and modernity with simple diction for a highly-accessible read.

Rating: *** (3 out of 4, Good)

Leaf Garden Press, 2009; ISBN: 978-0-557-08922-2

Disclosure: A preview copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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Write what is hardest to say, my poetry instructor in grad school used to urge us, and Suzanne Richardson Harvey does precisely that. In A Tiara for the Twentieth Century: The Collected Poems of Suzanne Richardson Harvey, the poet tackles subjects ranging  from motherhood, family relationships and aging to bulimia, AIDS and homelessness.

Whether approaching a big issue (such as the aftermath of Chernobyl in “The Wheat Fields of Chernobyl”) or celebrating small marital moments (in “The Merits of Dining at Home”), her phenomenal word choice enables her to find the music in language. Take, for example, these lines from “Delivery Room”:

My body is a canvas stretched
To catch a falling wing walker
Pulsing like a tom-tom in some obscure and distant jungle

While a free verse poem, there is nonetheless an almost implicit meter: the insistent beat of these lines mimics the rhythmic stages of birth.

Harvey makes skillful use of poetic techniques, such as repetition, in “The Year of Gambler’s Anonymous”:

Love was 20
You could rest your heart in that
Love was a pair of 8’s
You could carve in two
Love was 11
You could mold that into magic.

Through this repetition, she captures the compulsion which drives the central character of the poem.

Such deft choices contribute to this collection’s success. Rather than taking easy outs of lapsing into abstracts, Harvey meets each subject head on, distilling it into essential moments and imagery. In each case, she finds the language to communicate truths in a powerful, specific and often tactile way.

In “Confronting AIDS,” she takes a personal approach to this devastating disease, acknowledging the impact it’s had on society and the investment many people have in finding a cure:

Those crippled cells you can’t claim alone
They’re lodged in the chambers of my heart
Where labels like syndrome and sarcoma
Are blank as a forgotten Christmas tag.

With this collection, Harvey, whose work has appeared in Wild Violet, has indeed crafted a tiara, a delicate coronet crafted from years of skillful, intuitive use of language.

Rating: **** (4 out of 4, Must Read)

Fithian Press, 2009; ISBN: 978-1-56474-489-0

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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If you like humor, real-life stories or just plain good writing, you will enjoy Idol Musings: Selected Writings from an Online Writing Competition edited by Sophie N. Childs. Idol Musings includes some of the best entries from LJ Idol, an annual online contest for Live Journal modeled after American Idol. Entrants come from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Some are established writers and some have never been previously published. What they do share is a love of blogging.

Childs has included entries on a variety of topics; there is something for everybody. While there some humorous pieces included, the book’s strength lies in the intensely personal pieces.

Some pieces, such as “Once Upon a Baby Doll” by Darcy Bridges, deal with the writer’s financial struggles. That is something more and more people can relate to.

Pieces also deal with other common themes such as love and loss and family. There several pieces on the theme of  “cracking up.” Although we may not have had experiences exactly the same as the writers, many of us can relate to the feeling of being overwhelmed with our lives. Other entries deal with experiences that may be unfamiliar and may even be uncomfortable for some people to discuss.

“How I Learned to Love the Bomb or Why I Stopped Being Angry and Started Living Life” by a writer known only as SG, describes her experiences as a lesbian dealing with other people’s homophobia. She starts her piece saying: “Ninjas are much cooler than pirates.” She explains that she has gotten tired of being angry at people who hate her because of her sexual orientation and has decided on a more subtle approach to dealing with them. “All I can do is live my life, the best way I know how and hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll come to see me (and my wife) as more or less just like them, except we happen-to-be-gay.”

In “To the Ghost I’ve Never Met,” the anonymous writer addresses her ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend that gave him herpes. The narrator talks about what it is to be a “one in six” statistic. The entry is a surprisingly compassionate treatment of a subject that can be uncomfortable for people to discuss.

Entries like these are so blunt in their openness, they may be shocking. But they also touch your heart. It’s worth reading Idol Musings to gain new insight into a new form of writing that is still emerging the blog. You will also gain insight into the online community at Live Journal. Like any community, there may not be disagreements, but it’s obvious there is a bond this online community where they can share their personal experiences.  Most importantly, by reading Idol Musings, you will gain insight into the human experience.

Rating: **** (Must Read)

Fey Publishing, 2009; ISBN: 978-0-473-15100-3.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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By the time anyone has reached 70 to 80 years of age, he or she will have accumulated a wealth of stories. At some point, a friend or family member is likely to suggest, “You ought to write a book.” Of all those people with interesting stories, only about 10 percent probably have anything worth writing about, and only a fraction of them are capable of turning their stories into a worthwhile book. I say this by way of explaining why so many memoirs — especially those which are independently or self-published — tend to fall flat.

In Arthur Birkby’s case, he does relate some interesting stories in his book, Dig Up My Gold (But I Won’t Say Where It’s Buried.)  For example, he shares tales of his family’s life in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s in Philadelphia.  In the second half of the book, he talks about life in the noncombatant role of chaplain’s assistant during World War II. These stories are simply organized chronologically but fail to relate to each other through any other path than that they all happened to the same person.

While Birkby’s tales could serve as useful raw material for local historians, genealogists, and military buffs, he falls prey to the tendency that strikes many beginning authors: a failure to find focus. In truth, this comprises two different books: one about the experiences within a close-knit yet quirky Philadelphia family in the early part of the century and, secondly, a book about World War II Army experiences. While all these stories come from the same man’s life, they otherwise feel disjointed. The book would be stronger if he had concentrated on one particular type of story.

Aside from his immediate family and, of course, historians and genealogists, this book is unlikely to interest any other readers.

Rating: ** (Fair)

Tate Publishing, 2006; ISBN: 1-5988624-8-0.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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On the surface, Genuine Men: Journeys in Stories and Stills sounds like a promising project. Photographer Nancy Bruno set out to depict the lives of men from a variety of backgrounds and ages, and to share their views on what it means to be a real man.  Unfortunately, for a book centered around photography, the portraits fail to impress.

Considering that the photos are black-and-white, most are also low contrast, in an uninteresting palette of medum grays. The framing of these photos often fails to make sense, which could have been addressed during the print-making. All serious photographers should understand such techniques.

Even more baffling is the fact that these photos rarely connect with the stories being told. Bruno must have decided, correctly, that action photos were best. But instead of, say, showing a pastor preaching to his church, or a youth counselor working with children, she depicts them in unrelated activities such as biking and jogging. Often, these activities do not even appear in the write-ups as significant parts of these men’s lives.

The write-ups, most of them a page to a page and a half, are equally flat and uninteresting. Despite their short length, they are often too wordy, without purpose. Why are these men the best examples of being a real man? That question is often left unanswered.

While this project, on its surface, boasted many merits, the execution is sadly lacking.

Rating: * (Save Your Money)

Bridgeway Books, 2008; ISBN: 978-1-934454=27-5.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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While much of modern fantasy makes use of similar tropes and settings, The Halfling’s Court by Danielle Ackley-McPhail takes fantasy to a new level: blending the familiar with the unexpected, timelessness with modernity and— believe it or not — faeries with a biker gang.

Ackley-McPhail first introduced this world through two stories she wrote for collections she edited, Bad Ass Faeries 1 and 2. Even though those collections focused on revisiting the mythological world of faeries, her stories stood out for their fresh perspective.

She has clearly done her research into the biker world and writes believably from that perspective. In this tale, a halfling, Lance Cosain, who is part human, part faerie, has formed his own “kingdom” in the form of a biker gang composed of humans, fellow halflings and renegade faeries.  While he’s aware of his dual nature, he has never learned to harness the power of his faerie half.

While he has taken little notice of the faerie world, they have been taking note of him. When he is perceived as a threat, they send forces against him. Thus begins the clash between the two worlds, beginning with the two original stories and contributing additional background into his family and his place within the faerie world.

It’s the sign of a unique talent to be able to blend two disparate worlds so convincingly and to produce a compelling story. Like her protagonist, Ackley-McPhail’s book is a hybrid of literary genres. And like her protagonist, her book draws from the strengths of each and combines them into an entertaining, page-turning tale.

Rating: **** (Must Read)

Dark Quest, 2009: ISBN: 978-0-976901-6-7.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the author.

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Final Photographs is from the series SHADOWMASTER:  Traveling Medicine Show presents Dr. Mysterium, the faith healer SHE, adventuress Cat Stanley, with performer Dman Dread and Sideshow Kids. The series entertains the human feeling that someone else is there, a numinous view.

More at http://www.ceceliachapman.com/video.html

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