INTRODUCTION
THE POWERS EFFECT
THE FIRST HALF HOUR after you come away from reading work by Tim Powers can be a disorienting experience. You’ve entered a world where the rules don’t quite match our own, but are close enough so that you can almost juxtapose the two realities over one another. Or rather, it sometimes seems that you have been living in the real word while reading Powers (or perhaps that phrase should take capitalization: “Real World”), and now you’re back to the shadow existence that Plato and Socrates were always going on about, and trying to escape. You’ve been banging up against the giant tuning forks of existence, the archetypes, when you are in a Powers story, and afterwards you’re only bumping into common walls, desks, and chairs.
But one of the fun things about reading a Powers story— perhaps the best thing of all—is that you come away from the story seeing people not as sacks of meat bludgeoned around by a dumb universe, but as strange conglomerations of collective archetypes, souls, memories, and possible states. Unlike an LSD experience, which woefully does not produce the years of intense flashbacks promised in the advertisements, you can find yourself having Tim Powers flashbacks at odd moments for the rest of your life. It truly feels as if a new sense has been added onto your normal five. What’s great, and a little scary, is that once you have it, the “Powers Effect” doesn’t go away.
The writer Dean R. Koontz, who is an old friend of Tim Powers from college days, is keenly aware of the Powers Effect on himself.
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Goodbye little chocolate doughnuts sold in neat cellophane packages; hello, chocolate gyroidal pastries produced by a secret priesthood dating back to first-century Rome and sold by street vendors who provide them three at a time in a red cardboard pix, with a knowing wink.
That’s the way it is after you read a novel by Tim Powers. This might be his breakthrough time travel and science fiction genre-bender, The Anubis Gates, or the book on which they based half the story and most of the magical system of the fourth of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, On Stranger Tides. It might be World Fantasy award winner Last Call, or it might be Alternate Routes, an August 2018 Baen original Powers novel set along a ghost-ridden stretch of the Los Angeles freeway system that must exist in some universe that is slightly more real than ours.
It is also an effect that each Powers story delivers. So here you have in your hands an extremely effective set of needles for altering the warp and woof of everyday existence and sewing a few threads of forever into the fabric.
The archetypes you will be banging up against come from a deeply imbued sense of a purposeful world. The philosophers have a word for this, which is “teleological.” Tim Powers stories are deeply teleological. In almost every story a character discovers that the random universe he thought he inhabited is instead charged with meaning and is driving toward a purpose that could be good, but that could also be evil.
“Noumena” is another ten-dollar philosophical term that is sometimes useful to pull out of the old trunk we saved from the good ship Immanuel Kant and bandy about like our great-great-great grandfather’s sword allegedly from the Spanish-American War. A “noumenon” (the singular form) simply means something (we can’t quite say what, and it isn’t really a “thing” at all) that is beyond our sensations. Okay, maybe it isn’t that simple a concept. Anyway, you could look at the human mind as a sorting device that only lets in the kinds of stuff that will not blast our brains to pieces. We call this stuff “things that happen,” or phenomena. The phenomena get let in. The noumena are kept out.
Except in a Tim Powers story, the noumena aren’t kept out.
That is, I think, what the Powers Effect is. It is a lingering ability to sense the noumena in our everyday surroundings. Of course, if you are anchored in the soon-to-be-outmoded concepts of early twenty-first century philosophy and insist on “seeing through” such premodern Kantian nonsense right down to the whistle of darkness that is your nutty little heart, you will have to fool yourself into thinking of a Powers story as “mere words” that evoke a “self-perpetuating response.” In either case, Powers will get to you. That’s because he does it with magic, not philosophy, so there’s no thinking your way out of it.
A Powers story is a kind of spell—which is the fun of reading it.
Take one of the greats in this volume, “The Bible Repairman.” What alternate purgatory have we landed in? It seems that Bibles come defective from the source. They just won’t let us do what we wish to do. So Terry Torrez fixes them. It seems like the perfect metaphor for modern folk. Think a certain truth should not be your truth? Hire a dude to sprinkle some special sauce on it and wipe it out. Adultery? Envy? Gluttony? No longer your problem, bub. We have the sacred technology to solve those little glitches. And were they really glitches at all, but just something some old patriarch said was wrong in order to wield a little sadistic power? Give your guilt the heave-ho.
The problem is, truth is true. Wrong is not right. You don’t wipe it away so much as push it below until it bobs back to the surface elsewhere. Terry is all too aware of this inconvenient fact. That is why only a lost soul should become a bible repairman. Because somebody always pays the price. Better if you deserve it.
But this is only the first layer in a deeply affecting tale. Because Terry isn’t so doomed as he imagines himself to be. Ghosts haunt him because he doesn’t want to let go of those he loves. In a way, the more he loses of himself by performing his brujo’s magic for the good of others, the closer he comes to redeeming his own mortal sin. It’s a heartbreaking story that will, in the end, leave you oddly hopeful.
Which is another thing about Powers. His stories are real stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. He may be a literary craftsman with the metaphors and spare and evocative word choices and such, but he always, always has a hell of story to tell. You can see this is in the beautifully crafted plot of “Salvage and Demolition,” with its delightfully overlapping time travel narrative lines. But it’s just as true with a completely out-there tale such as the story from which the collection takes its title, “Down and Out in Purgatory,” or the hilarious amalgamation of personal names, life-greedy ghosts, and chain letters, “Pat Moore.”
Once you buy into the magic, into the teleology and the glimpses of noumena, the story makes perfect sense—always in a certain twisted and delightful manner.
Another Powers staple you see in “Down and Out in Purgatory” is a wry . . . well, it may as well be said . . . traditional Catholic and broadly Christian take on things. There is a great deal of C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in the idea of the afterlife in “Down and Out in Purgatory,” with its characters doing their best to constantly misunderstand the situation they are in, and the eternal consequences they are careening toward. But there’s also a lot of straight-up baroque excess you might find in the world of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series.
Tim Powers may be a Catholic intellectual, but he’s also a dyed-in-the-wool science fiction and fantasy geek who wears a “Miskatonic University” class ring around for kicks.
There are not subtle and nearly insubstantial differences between good and evil in these stories. That’s because there are not subtle and insubstantial differences between good and evil in the world we live in, where the distinctions between the two are fairly stark and self-defining. In a Powers story it is people who are subtle and interesting; it’s people who are confused, and limited, and tempted to do the wrong thing for gain, but who usually find a way through to some sort of revelation and resolution that allows good to triumph in its way. In other words, Powers stories usually have happy endings. Or at least bittersweet endings that are deserved based on the story, and that don’t come out of the blue. These are traditional stories in the very best sense, even though their subject matter is weirder than hell.
There are a few other matters that deserve to be pointed out to increase your enjoyment of this collection. One is that a number of the stories here are written with James P. Blaylock. Powers and Blaylock have been friends since their college days, not at Miskatonic University—perhaps unfortunately—but at Cal State Fullerton, where they were part of the literary set that included science fiction writer K.W. Jeter and, later, Koontz. Powers and Blaylock have fed off each other like aesthetic vampires ever since (well, perhaps the relationship is more symbiotic), and their influence on each other’s work is profound.
Powers and Blaylock are the coinventors of the Romantic poet William Ashbless. You will find mention of him in several spots in the collection. They have put so much work into Ashbless that he almost seems to be real. He is, in fact, one of the main characters in the great Powers novel The Anubis Gates. But there is no real William Ashbless. At least on our plane of existence.
One influence that is not so much literary, but personal, is the late Philip K. Dick. If you know even a bit of Dick’s biography, you’ll see several characters that are reflections of Philip K. Dick in these stories. As a young man, Tim Powers was friends with Phil Dick, and a protégé of sorts.
Whatever you may think of Philip K. Dick’s work— I am a big fan of his short stories from the sixties—there is no gainsaying the fact that Dick was an extraordinarily generous and kind fellow who went out of his way to encourage and help fledgling writers and others who may have chosen equally grim roads in life. Powers was the beneficiary of that magnanimity and has himself paid it forward in many ways by teaching and mentoring others through the years. As an editor, I often run into authors who have had happy and encouraging encounters with Tim Powers.
Powers stories are often about love: its missed opportunities, disappointments, but mostly its subtle antidote to life’s evil, and its casual, even brutal, victory against all manner of twisted geniuses determined to turn affection against itself for their own dastardly ends. In fact, a Powers “ghost” is often the psychic resonance of possibilities set in motion by love, for both good and ill. It cannot be a coincidence that at science fiction conventions, writing conferences, and elsewhere, Tim and his wife Serena can usually be regarded as an inseparable unit.
There is another inspiration in Powers’ work that is even stronger than love or friendship.
The Los Angeles greater metropolitan area.
L.A. is the setting for a majority of the stories in this collection, and Tim Powers has turned that basin of teeming humanity into a landscape as seething with delirium, mystery, depravity, wonder, and magic as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. There are ancient apartment buildings hidden away up tiny canyons whose roads are overhung with eucalyptus trees and jacaranda rank with blue blossoms where secret sects attempt to cheat death itself by weaving together their souls into cobweb-like group minds. There are burnt out San Bernardino lots where family houses used to stand filled with ghosts from all of yesterday’s tragedies, some of whom don’t even realize that they are dead. There is the freeway system, which for Tim Powers is as symbolic, rich, dangerous, and unfathomable as the Mississippi River was for Mark Twain. And stitching it altogether are the hopes and dreams of millions of people lapping and overlapping against one another, creating psychic eddies and holes in space time where strange things thrive.
The collection ends with “Sufficient Unto the Day,” a new story that was first published at the Baen website and that appears here for the first time in good old traditional print. This one is about Thanksgiving and, for those who have ever had kids who can’t take their eyes off video games, YouTube personalities, and/or binge-inducing television shows, this one will resonate. For with great technology comes the possibility of great evil, and the better your reception the better chance that the technology can receive you. Tech is not always a medium. When it becomes and end in itself, it can and will reach out and grab you, pull you in, and take you away forever.
Sometimes we need a reminder that all the magical technology of the witch doctors and shamans from our past, and the game designers and YouTubers of our present, can be dangerous distractions. Even the great temptation that comes up again and again in stories by Tim Powers, the lure of everlasting Earthly life, turns out to be a mere diversion from the true path.
And what is that path? Love. Family. Hewing to what is right even when we can’t see it so well, when we’re confused, tipsy from drink or life, and susceptible to illusion. Throughout all the weirdness in a Tim Powers story, these are the only constants we can depend on, the only method of escape from a hangman’s sentence of spiritual oblivion and material dissipation in an insensible universe. It’s the hallmark of a Tim Powers hero, as well. To survive, you have to figure out how the magic works, sure, but even then, you must hold on to what you know is right, see yourself as the imperfect person you are, have faith—and leap into the weirdness. The leap of faith may not save your world, but it will absolutely get you off the mad carousel of materialistic determinism and magic-induced repetition where so many die after never having really lived. It may even set you free forever.
That’s the real Powers Effect.