- Born
- Birth nameTimothy Thomas Powers
- Powers has lived in southern California since 1959. He graduated from California State University at Fullerton with a B.A. in English in 1976; the same year he published his first two novels, "The Skies Discrowned" and "Epitaph in Rust." Powers, who takes more time and care writing novels than his fans would like, went on to sell "The Drawing of the Dark" (1979, a supernatural fantasy about King Arthur and beer-drinking), "The Anubis Gates" (1983, time-travel fantasy featuring Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, and winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo), "Dinner at Deviant's Palace" (1987, a science fiction post-apocalypse novel and winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award), "The Stress of Her Regard" (1989, a vampire novel featuring English Romantic poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron), the Fisher-King, Tarot-card-haunted trilogy of "Last Call" (1992, winner of the World Fantasy Award), "Expiration Date" (1996), and "Earthquake Weather" (1997), and "Declare" (2001, a supernatural spy novel featuring Kim Philby). A very accessible writer, he has often taught the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University and the Writers of the Future Workshop, and chats regularly with his fans on the Tim Powers discussion list on yahoogroups.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Fiona Kelleghan <fkelleghan@aol.com>
- SpouseSerena Batsford(1980 - present)
- Neighbor and friend of Philip K. Dick.
- Powers is famous for his knotty plots, his remarkable erudition, his exhaustive research into historical detail (every one of which, evidently, finds a home in his fiction), his specializing in the Romantic Poets and Arthuriana, his ebullient capacity for writing fantasy, science fiction, and horror - but is most loved because he creates totally believable characters and suspenseful, truly WEIRD action-adventure.
- Novel, 'Last Call', was optioned by FreakShowFilms in 2000.
- I suppose that what September 11th did was not so much change how we think of the world or humanity as remind us of a lot of things we already knew about humanity. (We could have done without the reminder.) It reminds us that any time of peace and prosperity is a fortunate exception to the way the machinery ordinarily works, and in retrospect it makes you appreciate that time.
- Compared to fantasy, science fiction is almost a branch of mainstream. Fantasy is based on things that are logically impossible, going in directions that apparently can't exist. Let's say mainstream fiction would be a straight, one-dimension high-speed highway rushing along between trees. Fantasy is more like a perpendicular look down a corridor of trees to a clearing. It's rotating 90°, it's a fresh dimension - and it's that perpendicular look, that dislocation or vertigo or disorientation that's the fun. It doesn't so much matter what's in the clearing over there, whether it's a unicorn or Cthulhu; it's the fact of the new dimension. The attraction of fantasy is experiencing the impossible as real, but we wouldn't bother to do it if there wasn't a kind of resonance that happens in our heads too, if there wasn't this wiring in our heads that, like an induction coil, picks up a current from it. There has to be a response in the reader's head, which implies that Jungian archetypes are in some sense real.
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