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Tim Powers People Chat |
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PEOPLE Online Hosts Science Fiction Writer, Tim Powers 3/12/97
PEOPLE: Hello everyone. I'm Andrew Alden, your host, and on behalf of PEOPLE Magazine I'd like to welcome you here tonight. A game of poker played with Tarot cards on a houseboat on Lake Mead ... the ghost of Thomas Edison, sucked out of his dying nostrils by Henry Ford ... Arguably, fantasy writer TIM POWERS -- winner of the prestigious Philip K. Dick & World Fantasy awards -- has one of the most active imaginations around. We're talking to him tonight and also giving away copies of his most recent novel, "EXPIRATION DATE." Tim, welcome to CompuServe and the Net! Tim Powers: Happy to be here! PEOPLE: Tim, your latest novel is great! It screams for a movie ... is there one in the works? Tim Powers: No, alas, it has not been optioned yet. I say "yet" optimistically. Hollywood is a mystery to me. I've made a point of staying ignorant in that regard. PEOPLE: Most of your novels invoke historical personalities and embed them into magical story lines. Do historical figures make magic all that much more believable? Tim Powers: Exactly! Fantasy always labors under the handicap of being obviously impossible. When I can hang onto a real character and event, I can get over the speed bump of disbelief. For example, I try to find colorful areas of history where the real people did behave in an inexplicable manner -- like Blackbeard setting his beard on fire. I can then use magic to explain what was in reality crazy behavior. PEOPLE: As it happens, the wreckage of Blackbeard's ship, Queen Anne's Revenge, was uncovered very recently in North Carolina. What do you look forward to learning from the wreck? And how does the myth of Blackbeard differ from the reality? Tim Powers: It's too late now for me. But it would be nice to find mirrors attached to the gunwales, voodoo markings carved into the wood, burn patches, etc. Blackbeard's myth in my own book has manipulation of voodoo. And he was trying the best he could to find the Fountain of Youth. In reality of course he was just crazy! PEOPLE: In the Blackbeard novel, "On Stranger Tides," you marry your pirates to the transplanted religions of West Africa that have become voodoo, santeria, etc. Did Europeans of the region really believe in these? Tim Powers: No, I don't think they REALLY did. They insulated themselves as best they could. For the purposes of my book, however, the savvy Europeans discovered that those informal religions were real and powerful. PEOPLE: "The Anubis Gates" and "The Stress of Her Regard" both recreate the world of the English Romantic poets. What's your fascination with this period, the earliest 1800s? Were these characters the first rock stars? Tim Powers: Byron almost was! Byron was a perfectly glamorous figure -- the handsomest man in Europe, he could shoot and ride -- and he was dramatic: had a child by his half-sister, etc. He has the sort of life, like Hemingway, that was almost more colorful than his work. Also, they were believers in supernatural beings; the details of their deaths -- Byron, Shelley, and Keats -- were ambiguous enough to lend themselves to fantasy. Also, I had been a fan of Byron, and Shelley, and Wordsworth, and Coleridge since high school. So I already had read their letters, biographies, etc. PEOPLE: The audience is speaking up... Question: I always wondered if THE ANUBIS GATES originally had another title. Tim Powers: Yes ... It had several! At one point it was to be called "The Face Under the Fur," but my friend K.W. Jeter told me that was bad. At another time the title was "The Anachronist," but people were afraid that would cause confusion. That was the working title when ACE Books turned it down. That was in the 1970s. PEOPLE: What do you think it was really like in Switzerland, on the shores of the lake that summer when Byron, and Percy Shelley, and his young wife Mary began telling ghost stories? Tim Powers: It was probably a pleasant time. They all had money, and they were having fun shocking the tourists. Byron was at the height of his powers as a writer. And Mary, at age 19, must have been fascinating to have been able to write her book. I wish I could have been there! PEOPLE: We're on line with TIM POWERS... Another question or two in the audience about your earlier novels... Question: Mr. Powers, when did you first come across the idea that an inverse correlation exists between the practice of magic, and the presence of iron? (On Stranger Tides.) Tim Powers: I don't know. Certainly there has always been the tradition that cold iron repels ghosts. And it's one of those ideas that has a sort of intrinsic authority to it. After you've thought it up you think, "Well, damn! Of course!" PEOPLE: In "The Anubis Gates" you tell a tale of time travel... If you could travel in time, where would you go? Perhaps you do this already when you're researching...? Tim Powers: Yes, I do! I would not go back further than good stereo and antibiotics. Certainly not further back then surgical anesthetics. I do think people were markedly different several hundred years ago; casual cruelty seems to have been an implicit makeup of most pre-20th century civilizations -- all the way from burning at the stake to bear baiting. PEOPLE: What say we throw the doors open to the Internet... and take a question from there right now. Question: Do you ever teach at Clarion or Clarion West? Tim Powers: Yes. I have taught four times at Clarion East, most recently in 1995 with Karen Fowler, when we taught the last two weeks, which before that had always been the province of Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. Karen and I will be teaching again this summer. I really do get a kick out of teaching at Clarion -- it's great to be able to talk sincerely to people who are interested and able to write great stories of their own based on the mechanical advice that I give to them. I've never taught Clarion West, in Seattle. I'm afraid the attractions of downtown Seattle would keep me away from the workshop -- Pike's Market! PEOPLE: In your recent novels you've moved into the present, with a twisted Las Vegas tale in "Last Call" and a twisted L.A. tale in "Expiration Date." Is it harder to root fantasy in the here and now than in the past? Tim Powers: No. Just because of the enormous advantage of knowing every goofy detail of the present -- all the urban myths and idiot delusions of one's friends, the Weekly World News at the checkout stands, etc. Since fantasy does require such extensive and authoritative shoring up of real-world details, the 20th century with its contemporary jargon provides a very solid looking facade for my medieval concoctions. PEOPLE: I was surprised not to find Richard Nixon's presence in your latest. Tim Powers: Nixon could be lots of fun -- his career is shadowy enough and bumpy enough to leave room for any number of my sort of made-up conspiracy explanations. I am a little reluctant to play fast and loose with characters who still have living relatives around; my fictional explanations for events seldom happen to overlap anything I actually believe, and I'd be embarassed to have anyone think I was advancing a serious theory. Question: How long did it take you to write your latest book? From your first inspiration till the day it hit the bookshelves? Tim Powers: Off the top of my head, let me say three years. I always start by reading at almost complete random and hope to stumble across links and hints that I can turn into a plausible story. Really, "Expiration Date" began with two facts: that Edison once tried to invent a telephone to speak with the dead, and that his last breath was caught in a test tube that's on display in Greenfield Village, in Michigan. Following up on those, I read a lot about the movie industry, electrical engineering, Houdini, and L.A. And then my wife and I had to go climb through the ruins of Houdini's abandoned mansion, in Laurel Canyon, and then bribe a tour guide to let us explore the bowels of the Queen Mary. The temptation with me is always to let research become a goal in itself, I suppose so that I can avoid the actual labor of typing. PEOPLE: Let's talk some more about "Expiration Date." The time is today -- 1992, and yet the Los Angeles you depict is much grittier, more haunted than the L.A. we know. Or IS it?? Tim Powers: Not at all. Get well south of the music center; check out Broadway and Fifth; look at some of those neighborhoods beyond the chain link on the shoulder. I may be a professional paranoid, but it has always struck me that there's something ominous in those sunny De Chirico sunblinded cityscapes. But then, I'm easily alarmed. PEOPLE: We're speaking tonight with Tim Powers, fantasy writer par excellence! Why don't we take another Internet question... Question: Who were your favorite writers when you started out? Tim Powers: Heinlein. Lovecraft. When I started out in college I had been reading almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy. Luckily for my writing career, I started to read more widely in college -- fantasy needs constant fortification from mainstream real-world writers. Nowadays my favorite writers are Kingsley Amis, John D. MacDonald, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson. Fritz Leiber is still my absolute hero. PEOPLE: Some things in "Expiration Date" nagged at me: Nicky Bradshaw and his snuff, Pete Sullivan and his dead twin sister, other worlds superimposed on this one, the unexpected eloquence of ordinary people, the endless fight against entropy and death ... these and other things are so suggestive of your old friend and fellow L.A. resident, Philip K. Dick. Is his ghost in this book, too? Tim Powers: Now that you mention it, I agree that it has a Phil Dick tone, which I must admit I'm pleased to see. I never really showed Dick any of the things I was writing during the time I knew him, just because he was always so much better a writer than I'll ever be. But certainly I think his work has come as close to enduring literature as anybody in our field. Boy could I tell you some Phil Dick stories... PEOPLE: Oh for another hour! Question: Koot Parganas, the protagonist in "Expiration Date," is just a kid. What special challenges do you face in telling a story, or a part of a story through the eyes of a child who has just become a teenager? Tim Powers: Just between you and me, I'm at a handicap there, not having any children of my own. I suppose I mainly relied on my own memories of being eleven years old, and the confidence that I haven't matured all that much since. PEOPLE: Tell us a little about your work habits. Do you write every day? For how many hours? With what equipment? Tim Powers: I work every day. Generally for each book, I have to spend about six months just reading and underlining, and typing my questions and suggestions into scratch files. When I actually begin to write the book, I do write at least five days a week and try to do at least 1000 words a day. Every day I would rather sit in the sun and reread an old John D. MacDonald paperback than work. PEOPLE: You've carved a great career niche as a writer of genre fiction. As a writer are you ever tempted to write so-called mainstream fiction? ... you ARE getting closer to the present! Tim Powers: No. Virtually all of my fiction reading is in the mainstream, but somehow my plot concocting machinery was fixed on science fiction and fantasy from my youth; I just can't think up a story that doesn't involve ghosts or time travel or pictures in an old family photo album that come to life at night. PEOPLE: Where are you teaching next? What about new books, or paperback releases? etc.? Tim Powers: The next one is a thing called "Earthquake Weather," which will be published by TOR in August. Goofy as it may sound, it makes a trilogy of "Last Call," "Expiration Date," and itself. Characters from those previous novels get together in the implicit crisis that had lain behind those two stories, and everybody finally gets what they have coming to them. PEOPLE: Wonderful! Tim Powers, THANK you so much for being with us tonight! Tim Powers: It's been my pleasure! PEOPLE: And many thanks as well to our audience both on CompuServe, and on Pathfinder, out on the wild and haunted Internet! Good night! Originally published at: http://www.pathfinder.com/people/interactive/transcripts/p/tpowerstrans.html - ccb |
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