Cover Text:

"An Epitaph in Rust follows young Thomas from his escape from a rural monestary into the wilds of a future Los Angeles. There he joins a theater company where the play is definitely not the thing - revolution is - and he finds himself in the middle of it. The mayor has been blown up and his android guards are determined to end insurrection. But the theater company has other ideas..."

Published by:

Laser Books, Toronto, 1976
NESFA Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1989

Opinion:

I tracked down a copy out of this book out of a sense of completeness, and I can honestly say that... it's not bad. Having said that, I'll admit if I didn't know it was by Powers, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell (except for the Ashbless reference), and it probably wouldn't be on my bookshelf. It's not particularly memorable, but it does have some hints of the style we'll see in later works.

What more can I say about this one that Powers hasn't said for himself in the foreword below? Read it for yourself. He correctly points out that it was written by him when he was a different person, and the difference shows. I agree with his statements, but I like the book too.

Bottom line: Don't expect to be blown away like you might have been by The Anubis Gates, but give this one a chance anyway! Average Powers writing is still comparable to the best of some other authors.

- ccb 4/15/99

Foreword to the 1989 edition by Tim Powers: Comments From A Proxy Show-Off

Two days before Hallowe'en in 1976 I rode my beat-up old Honda 350 to a Walden's bookstore in Buena Park to buy copies of my second book, An Epitaph in Rust, which had just been published by Laser Books. Buying copies of a book you've written is a delicate sort of thing. You want the clerk to know that you're the author of the book - you want everybody to know - but you don't want to seem to care that they know it; therefore you buy six copies or so, and hope that they'll ask you how come you're buying so many copies of the same book. "Hm?" you imagine yourself saying in reply. "Oh, 'cause I wrote it, and I haven't got my author's copies in the mail yet." And the clerk, in this daydream, is of course stricken with awe.

I don't remember whether or not the clerk commented on how many copies I bought, in this case. I do remember cranking the bike back to my apartment and dashing upstairs to haul a copy out of the Walden's bag and gloat over it for a while.

The book, not the bag - though I'd probably have been happier trying to gloat over the bag.

I had become a "professional writer" a year and a half earlier, when Laser Books bought my first novel, on the basis of four chapters and an outline. I had immediately quit school - Cal State Fullerton, where I was insipidly pursuing a Master's Degree in English Literature - and quit my job too, which had been to make pizzas and draw beers in a fairly low-life pizza parlor in Anaheim. I'm a writer now, I'd told myself, I don't need to be messing around with school or jobs.

And so, for a year and a half, on the now inconceivable income of about two thousand dollars a year, I had been doing nothing but writing. I'd written that first novel, which was called The Skies Discrowned, and An Epitaph in Rust, and, most recently, two books for a projected series of novels in which King Arthur keeps being reborn throughout history to keep saving the world. You know, King Arthur using Excalibur to chop open Nazi tanks in World War Two, King Arthur helping Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address - that sort of thing. (One of my pair of them, The Drawing of the Dark, was later expanded and published by Del Rey Books, and the other was eventually chopped up and cannibalized for The Anubis Gates.)

I should have expected some trouble with An Epitaph in Rust. The editors had insisted on dropping the An from the title, and had from the beginning ignored my request to be Tim - rather than the unwieldy Timothy - Powers, and in the galley proofs the text of the book had been re-written considerably.

In the second chapter, for example, our protagonist throws through the window a "poodle in a powder blue dog sweater" - but in the proofs this had been changed to a dog in a bullet-proof dog sweater. Now, I suppose I can imagine a society in which it would be worth the trouble and expense to outfit dogs with such protection, but the society in this book was certainly not it.

And they had insisted on using twenty-four-hour-clock-time throughout, so that people went for beers at "14 hundred hours" instead of "two o'clock in the afternoon." In chapter seven, in fact, in the published book, someone agrees to meet someone else at "thirty-three hundred hours." That almost counts as a Zen koan, I think.

And there were lots of places where what I'd written had been paraphrased or shortened.

I restored as much of the text as I could, in the margins of the galleys - but when I pulled that first copy out of the bag, I saw that most of my corrections had been disregarded. Luckily they did give the poodle his plain old dog sweater back, at least.

Shortly after that, Laser Books folded, and the English publisher for whom I'd been writing the King Arthur books decided that the proposed series was stupid, and cancelled it.

And so on a Monday night in November of '77 I started working at the pizza parlor again. I remembered all the routines - luckily, for we got a party of about a hundred square-dancers that night, and I had to handle the kitchen all by myself.

Not to my displeasure, An Epitaph in Rust disappeared pretty quickly. It only sold about 17,000 copies, which is damn poor for a paperback, and I never saw one review of it, not even in a fanzine. And on the few occasions in the years since when I've been called upon to sign a copy, I have generally written in, too, a caution against actually reading the thing.

This here, what you've got in your hands, is the original text, from my Xerox-copy of the typescript I sent to Laser Books. There's a couple of things not here that were in the published book - the quote, supposedly from a future history book, that appears at the beginning of the first chapter, and most of the paragraph that begins on page 37. The editors had me write and add them later, fearing that the reader would be confused without some extra explanations of how the society the book describes had come to exist. I have more faith in the intelligence of my readers than they did - also, I'm embarrassed to do so nakedly what K. W. Jeter refers to as info-dumping.

So this is the book exactly as I finished it in January of 1976, when I was still a month and two days short of my twenty-fourth birthday.

The temptation has been strong to re-write it here and there, but I've resisted it. It would just be a forced collaboration - I'm not really that twenty-three-year-old any more.

In fact, it's interesting for me now to look objectively at the book that he wrote. I like when he sneaks in the literary bits, like having a stranger with a broken sandal undo a mayor named Pelias - that's a reference to the Jason myth, as I recall; and it's clear that the author didn't know much about semi-automatic pistols; and I note, with some surprise, that the character of Pat Pearl is a really strikingly-accurate portrait of a young woman he was dating at the time.

I'm glad he never really ran off to Needles with her.

I mentioned the small kick of showing off to bookstore clerks with one's newly-released book; that should be just a prelude to showing off to all one's friends by forcing copies on them, and signing flyleaves with deceptively modest-sounding inscriptions. In the case of the Laser edition of Epitaph in Rust, that younger Tim Powers was never able to work up the proper degree of fatuous pride to do that.

So I'm very happy now, twelve years later, to be able to do his belated showing off for him.

I promise to try to do it with a straight face