Tim Powers

<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Timothy Thomas Powers (b. February 29, 1952 - ) American writer. BA in English, California State University, 1976.

Powers is known for his highly original novels that weave myth, folklore, legend, and true history with supernatural assumptions, wild (but believable) alternate explanations for events, a sense of adventure, and exquisite weirdness.

Born in Buffalo, New York, Powers moved to southern California as a child and has lived there since. Following a couple of science fiction novels, Power's first major novel was The Drawing Of The Dark (1979), which revolves around a 1529 soldier of fortune who gets involved with the Fisher King and a host of legendary heroes to repel the Turkish invasion of eastern Europe. Powers gained acclaim with The Anubis Gates (1983) in which nineteenth-century Anubis-worshipping sorcerers cast a spell to bring their god back into power while, in 1983, a millionaire manages to take a group back in time to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge speak in London in 1810. The Anubis Gates won the Prix Apollo (France) and the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. Set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, Dinner At Deviant's Palace (1984) centers on a quest to rescue a long lost love from the clutches of a dangerous religious cult. It also won the Dick Memorial Award.

Fantasy adventure On Stranger Tides was published in (1987) and featured pirates, voodoo, zombies, sorcerers, and the Fountain of Youth. Byron, Shelley, and Keats meet a supernatural creature "as beautiful as she is evil" in The Stress Of Her Regard (1989) which received the Mythopoeic Award. Last Call (1992), first of the loose trilogy that includes Expiration Date (1995) and Earthquake Weather (1997), won a World Fantasy Award. The three books link the myth of the Fisher King with gangsters, the wasteland of Las Vegas, the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, a haunted Los Angeles, body-swapping, and a million more oddities.

Declare (2000) was honored with the both the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. Reduced to a bare skeleton, Declare might be summed up as "WW2 and Cold War spies meet in a supernatural Lawrence of Arabia combined with Raiders Of The Lost Ark as written by John le Carre." His twelfth novel Three Days To Never is forthcoming in 2006.

Powers' short fiction is collected in Night Moves and Other Stories (2000) and The Bible Repairman (forthcoming).