Tim Powers

And a lot of authors have done that.

One of my favorite authors is Tim Powers and Chris Ferracchio, Gene Wolfe.

These guys, they've done that, right? Where they've taken some of Lovecraft's ideas and then kind of put them in the proper context.

right and so that's why i think lovecraft is important um as a writer just because of that reason right um because he was so influential um and like for for him i think you just have to kind of like say okay no there is a point here you know and if you read mocking you know um you you get both you get the horror and the hope in the same or at least you get a reason for the horror that's tied to free human free will and actual malevolent entities right And so, yes, I agree.

But he's being, like, you know, criticized for those things.

You know, rightly so, sure.

But I do think that his bleak – the thing that I think will stay with Lovecraft are the creatures he created, right? Because those authors I mentioned, like Tim Powers and Christopher Rockhill – and Gene Wolfe, they've already taken these creatures and like in Christopher Accio's case, like Cthulhu and like these other cosmic beings.

He's like, oh, those are the watchers from the Bible.

The Screen Rat article gives us two wildly different but equally incredible examples of how authors handle historical settings and older protagonists.

First, we have an absolute classic of the genre, On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers.

A true classic.

Published way back in 1987, it follows a man named John Chandoniac, who gets forced into piracy and reinvents himself as Jack Shandy in the early 18th century Caribbean.

She has to balance her devout faith, the daily anxieties of motherhood, and the massive, suffocating weight of this legendary reputation she built in her reckless youth.

If we connect this to the bigger picture, the contrast between these two approaches to historical fantasy is incredibly illuminating.

Tim Powers utilized the Caribbean, the epicenter of the transatlantic triangle trade.

Which was defined by European colonial powers fighting over sugar and enslaved people.

So, you know, it's no small thing to win to win a prize or to win a to become a finalist in the contest because you're you're being your work is being poured over by the best of the best, yeah.

Yeah, Tim Powers, Orson Scott Card, legendary name in speculative fiction.

So, yeah, nothing, pretty good prize.

It's a prize just to be involved.

The first text-based adventure game was Colossal Cave Adventure in 1976.

And that's really just like a colorized, scrolling, choose-your-own-adventure novel.

And then there was King's Quest in 1984, which was visual, but the majority of commands were text-based.

So you had to guess what the text was.

My show, uh, is honestly very similar to yours where I talk a lot about re-enchantment, you know, whatever that means.

But mostly like science fiction and fantasy authors that come from like a sacramental worldview, like Tim Powers, C.S. Lewis, Arthur Machen, those, those kinds of authors.

And then newer authors too, like I've had Jonathan on to discuss his book, and other, other newer Catholic or otherwise authors talking about their fiction.

We talk about mythology, folklore, pretty much anything kind of strange and sacramental, I'll, I'll...

Yeah.

A perfect example of this is a book called The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which was published in 1983.

This is a foundational classic that predates the term steampunk by four entire years.

Four years before anyone even knew what to call it.

It introduced tropes like body switching, mutants, and the hubris of the mad scientist.

The mad scientist archetype is crucial to steampunk, and this book laid the emotional and visual groundwork for that whole obsession with altering the natural order.

Which brings us to the actual birth of the word itself, because if Tim Powers laid the atmospheric groundwork in 1983, it was a few years later that someone finally put a name to this weird, wonderful literary concoction.

Enter K.W. Jeter in 1987.

So we've read, uh, Lord of the Rings.

Uh, we started out with red, uh, book of the new sun, uh, red, uh, Tim powers, novel declare red, true grit, red, Dorothy donuts, Lyman chronicles, red, uh, dune, uh, pool Anderson, uh, i'm currently reading um after after this discussion i'll go back up and keep reading uh rereading um uh susannah clark's jonathan strange and mr norrell that's a that's a recent one yeah it's not five years 20 years old it is so good it's also by the way i'm remembering reading it now i had forgotten that that is actually there are many books so the witch you wore like any good novel yeah is in dialogue with other novels and it's deliberately sort of leaning into and, and, and repeating and reusing and changing motifs and images and right from other novels, novels talk to each other.

Yeah.

One of the novels that this really talks to, uh, the, which you are really talks to is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

some image or some uh verbal phrase or something was the right one and then i'll go back later and go oh this is you know i'm whatever i'm i'm i'm borrowing from lord of the rings here or i'm borrowing from you know

conan or something

um for me the two living writers that i sort of most think about Um, when I'm thinking about this space are, uh, Tim powers and, uh, Neil Stevenson, Neil Stevenson used to talk about this.

I think, I think he meant the same kind of class of books.