Three Days To Never: The Interview

Tim Powers’ new novel, Three Days To Never (3DTN), is a supernatural thriller about spies, magic, science, religion, and the secret history of the 20^th century. Set in 1987 during that year’s famed three-day New Age “Harmonic Convergence,” the story involves Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Israeli intelligence, remote viewers, the Qabbalah, the nature of time, identity, and free will--and an unsuspecting English teacher from San Bernardino and his young daughter.

The author has graciously consented to give JimmyAkin.Org an exclusive interview about his new book.

* * *

JA.O: Authors usually dread the question “Where do you get your ideas?” so I won’t ask that, but I’d like to ask about the starting point for 3DTN. Where did the germ of this novel come from? What was the first thing that you decided about it? Did you want to write about a specific theme, a specific moment, a specific character, a specific concept?

Tim Powers: Actually it all started simply by me being curious about why Einstein's hair is white in all photographs after 1928. Biographies note that he had something like a heart attack at that time, in the Swiss Alps, but I was in my writer-paranoid mode, so I wasn't buying the heart-attack story.

      I suppose anybody's biography would yield the sort of clues I look for to base a story on -- I bet I could find them in a biography of Louisa May Alcott, or Beatrix Potter! -- but I was pleased to find that Einstein's life was particularly full of odd bits. He really did devote years to working on some kind of "maschinchen," little machine, which apparently in real life came to nothing, and he did go to a séance with Charlie Chaplin, and he did leave California forever on the day of the big Long Beach earthquake, for instance.

      I always simply note lots of interesting bits and then try to figure out what sort of story they appear to be part of -- as opposed to having a story in mind in advance and then looking for substantiation for it. And so when I found that Einstein was devoted to the state of Israel, for instance, and donated lots of his papers to a university there, I just noted that Israel would probably figure in the story. That led me to the Qabbalah and the Mossad, and then they led me on to lots of other colorful stuff.

* * *

I know that your stories are heavily researched. How did you go about researching this one?

      Well, I read a good dozen biographies of Einstein! Underlining and cross-referencing and making customized indexes on the flyleaves! (I always wind up wrecking my research books.) And I read heaps too on Qabbalah, and the history of Israel, and Charlie Chaplin, and old Hollywood, as the Einstein biographies pointed toward these things.

      And since the story's action was mostly taking place within an hour's drive of where I live, my wife and I were able (as usually we're not) to go to the places I was writing about, and take pictures and wander around and make notes. Since I usually can't go to the places I set my stories in, I insist that it's not necessary -- but just between you and me, it is a help!

* * *

3DTN involves the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. How did you go about researching them, and how close are the intelligence methods shown in the story to the ones the Mossad used in the 1980s? Are you at liberty to tell us or would you have to kill me and my blog readers if you said?

      The actual Mossad is more efficient than the fictional agents I put in the book -- but moderately inefficient characters are more useful in fiction and more interesting, I think, to read about. But the background and methods I give them are accurate for the 1980s, assuming my research books were accurate. I read Victor Ostrovsky's By Way of Deception , and Gordon Thomas's Gideon's Spies, and Israel's Secret Wars by Black and Morris, and several more. Taken altogether they probably gave me a plausible picture of the Mossad in the '80s, and plausibility is more crucial than strict accuracy. (And as you note, precise accuracy in espionage matters might be dangerous!)

* * *

When I read your stories, I’m often surprised to find out that things I thought you made up actually came from real history. For example, in 3DTN there is an occult group with ties to the Nazi Regime that I thought you likely made up (though we know the Nazis were interested in the occult). There is also a long-lost Charlie Chaplin film that I suspected was an invention of yours. Yet when I checked online, I found both of these were real. Are there other things buried in the novel that the reader might be surprised to find came from history?

      Actually a whole lot of it is real stuff -- Einstein's maschinchen for measuring faint voltages, his pal who assassinated the Austrian premier in 1916, the mid-movie interruption of the first screening of Chaplin's City Lights, the "kidnap" and ransom of Chaplin's dead body, for instances. This is a result of me getting my story almost ready-made by reading a whole lot of research stuff and noting the intriguing bits, which I then only have to fit together into a plot. It's much easier to just find all this than to make it up!

* * *

One of the things that I find fascinating about your work is the way that you mix real life with fantasy. Like many of your novels, 3DTN is set in modern times. This is different than many fantasy novels, which are set in either the Middle Ages or an imaginary period that is meant to be like the Middle Ages. Personally, except in the case of someone like Tolkien, I often find those stories coming across as flat or artificial. Is there a specific reason why you weave magic around modern settings instead of going with the traditional "sword and sorcery" type of fantasy? Is it just a personal preference or do you think there are advantages to writing magical tales set in the present day?

      Well, I want to trick my readers into believing, while they're reading the book at least,  that all this stuff is really happening, to real people. If I set it in that default-medieval world, with wizards and Dark Lords, readers would probably think, "Oh, an imaginary story!" and I don't want them noticing that it is, in fact, imaginary. So I put the magical stuff in alongside TVs and freeways and Marlboros, and hope that when the magical business starts up, it will seem to be as genuine as ... you know,  the internet and streetlights and Big Macs.

      Ideally my readers will develop a bit of reflexive mistrust of apparent, mundane reality! You really don't have to nudge readers very hard to elicit this. People say things like, "I'm not scared of ghosts, I'm scared of urban gangs and nuclear war," but if they're all alone in a house at night, and they hear a scraping sound down the hall, they don't think it's an urban gang member; for at least a moment or two they know it's a ghost.

* * *

Elements of your own life are often mixed into your stories. Your characters often live in the same town that you do, and incidents in the stories are often modeled on things that happened to you. For example, in your story “The Bible Repairman,” you have a character who accidentally set afire a Jehovah’s Witness Bible, just as you once did. Can you tell us some elements of your own life that found their way into 3DTN?

      I think most writers use their own lives as the basic kit for their protagonists, to be altered as plot might require. It's easier! You know the (ideally mildly interesting) details of your own life pretty thoroughly, and so a protagonist based on yourself is going to have a history, and tastes, and even such flaws as you might be aware of having.

      I don't have a daughter, and my wife fortunately is still alive! But Marrity's house is our house, and his furniture and books and cats and pickup truck are all ours. (Our pickup truck was a lot newer when he had it in '87 than it is now.) And I quit drinking some years ago, which I think might be a wise course for Marrity.

* * *

Last year you visited Israel for a science fiction convention. Visiting Israel was a very powerful experience for me, and I wonder how it affected you. What did you think about your trip and did getting to go there influence 3DTN in any way?

      Unfortunately my wife and I went to Israel after I had finished the book! I did manage to shove a few first-hand details about Tel Aviv into the book, at least. And the real-life Israel didn't contradict the Israel I had imagined -- I expected it to be a wonderful place, with admirable people, and it was certainly that.

      And we did get to Jerusalem, several times! As Catholics, we found that was kind of comprehension overload -- the realization that God walked right here, and according to tradition touched this particular stone, and died right here, is just disorienting. You only begin to appreciate it later, in pieces.

      We definitely want to go back. Ideally we'd go every year, with the tax excuse of attending the convention!

* * *

Your previous novel, Declare, had significant Catholic themes in it, while 3DTN has significant Jewish themes. Specifically, it has a magical system related to the Qabbalah of Jewish mysticism. Why did you decide to go that way this time? It’s not just that you're a huge Madonna fan or something is it?

Well, no. What I generally do in my books, once I've got a situation figured out, is look for the supernatural tradition most closely associated with it -- so that with pirates in the Caribbean I used voodoo [in the novel On Stranger Tides--ja], and with Arabs I used genies [in the novel Declare--ja].   Declare was fun, in that one of the historical characters' uneasy fascination with Catholicism gave me an excuse to present Catholicism as true. In this new book, I guess I present Judaism as true! That Mossad character is a fairly orthodox Jew, and isn't comfortable using Qabbalah.

      And Judaism isn't alien to Catholics, of course -- I always figure that if Catholicism were somehow, per impossibile, proved wrong, I'd jump straight into Judaism.

* * *

One of the ways that you ground your stories in real life is by weaving science and magic closely together. It’s not uncommon in your stories to have quantum mechanical explanations for magic, or ghosts explained as a partly electrical phenomena, or devices that are part technology and part enchantment. Depending on how it’s handled, I could see this either helping or hurting a story. What have you found to be the benefits and risks of closely juxtaposing science and magic?

      One way it helps -- I hope! -- in soliciting reader credulity is that it shows magic impinging on, participating in, reality as we know it. After all, if you can see a thing, then it's reflecting light, and so it must have some physical properties! And I like to give magical phenomena a quantum or Newtonian or relativistic structure, just because those have internal consistency and I hope my magical stuff will therefore have a plausible consistency. I don't want readers to think that I'm free to make up any old magical effects at all.

      The risk of this, of course, is that you'll make magic into just another technology -- pentagrams are effective up to such-and-such amount of stress, the effectiveness of magic spells diminishes as the square of the distance -- you risk losing the numinous, vertiginous qaulity which is really the whole point of magic. Real magic should be as scary as an earthquake, even if it's "good" magic.

* * *

H. P. Lovecraft felt strongly that a weird fiction story should be thoroughly grounded in reality and contain only a single supernatural element—the “wonder” at the heart of the story. Your approach is different: You strongly ground your stories in the real world but you weave in multiple supernatural elements. It’s like there is a whole magical subtext bubbling just under the surface of daily life. Do you think Lovecraft was too conservative about how much of the supernatural readers can accept or are there special challenges to pulling off the kind of thing that you do?

      Well I suppose I'd claim that I'm only introducing one magical element, but that it's got lots of apparently-unconnected side effects! -- but that would probably be more glib than true.

      Yes, I think Lovecraft was too conservative. The thing we want to show the reader is that there's a whole world of unsuspected stuff going on -- when Leeuwenhoek first looked into his microscope, he didn't see just one weird new creature, but dozens of them! The unsuspected world will have its internal consistencies, its own possibilities and impossibilities, but it's gonna be intricate.

* * *

Albert Einstein figures prominently in 3DTN and you go beyond the known facts of his life in working him into the story’s background. Einstein is such an iconic figure that many authors have felt the liberty to fictionalize his life in books and movies, but just recently we've had a great deal of criticism directed toward Dan Brown for his rewriting the facts of Jesus’ life in The Da Vinci Code, and Jesus is an even more iconic figure. A lot of people took offense at what Brown did, but a lot don’t take offense at a fictional version of Einstein’s life. How do you explain this and, in your view, how much liberty should authors have when fictionalizing the lives of historical figures?

      I think the main thing is to base your characterization on what's known of the real historical figure -- don't have him do things he never would have done. You can invent lots of unrecorded motivations for him, but he should react to those in character.

      I like to think I presented Einstein as an admirable character, which he appears mostly to have been. I've portrayed some historical bad guys somewhat sympathetically -- Bugsy Siegel, for example [in the novel Last Call--ja] -- but I don't think readers mind that as much as going the other way, and portraying revered figures as villains. Brown portrayed Jesus as a fairly vague nonentity, but at least he didn't make Him a bad guy!

* * *

Despite the emphasis on reality, your stories often have striking elements of whimsy. For example, some of your characters have joke names—and joke names based on ecclesiastical Latin at that! In a couple of your novels there was a character named “Neal Obstadt” (nihil obstat; “nothing obstructs”) and in 3DTN there’s a woman going by the name “Libra Nosamalo” (libera nos a malo; “deliver us from evil”). Is there a risk of harming suspension of disbelief here or do you think that the payoff in humor is enough for those who’ll get the joke?

      Well, I think there is a risk of harming suspension of disbelief, yes. I shouldn't do it! Anything that reminds the reader that he's just sitting in a chair holding a stack of papers all glued together at one edge, and not in the presence of the book's characters, is a mistake, even if it gets a laugh.

      It could be worse! After all, Neal Obstadt may have picked that name because of its associations, and Libra Nosamalo explains that her parents had an odd sense of humor.

      But the best sort of humor in a book is things that arise naturally from the action, things a reader can laugh at without stepping outside the story!

* * *

Compared to many contemporary novels, yours are fairly clean. While they’re meant for adults, they aren’t loaded up with sex scenes and they don’t celebrate sin. There are cuss words and your characters definitely have things they’d need to talk about in confession, but on a deeper level your books presuppose a moral structure to the universe. As a Catholic, how do you find the balance between showing the reality of man’s fallen condition and glorifying evil the way we commonly see in the media?

      Well, while I show people doing bad things -- even show the atractiveness of doing bad things! -- I like to think I show too that they work out badly, and that the characters would have been way better off not having done those things. Often a character wants to do the difficult right thing but keep a couple of pet sins too -- just little ones, they don't eat a lot or make much noise! And I hope I show that there's bad consequences of that. I always remember Lewis's statement in The Great Divorce, something like, "If we choose Heaven we will not be able to keep even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell."

      This is really more craft than morality -- given, I suppose, my own beliefs. Sex-scenes, for example, I think are generally just bad craft. They usually feel to me like clumsy gear-changes, jolting the reader abruptly from one sort of fiction into another. Not smooth carpentry!

* * *

J. R. R. Tolkien’s works envision a world that differs from ours in a number of respects. Some things are “okay” in his world that would not be okay in ours (e.g., Gandalf’s use of magic). C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are similar. When reading or watching science fiction and fantasy, I often imagine that I’m peeking in on a universe where God established different rules (which is certainly his right), but many people feel that there are limits to what authors should portray in this regard. A considerable number of Christians feel that J. K. Rowling crossed the line in her Harry Potter series and created a world that could tempt real-world children toward the occult. In your novels I’ve noticed that the more people chase after magic, the more they get burned by it. Where do you come down on this topic? Are there limits to how different an author should make the world he envisions? Does it depend on the audience? What are the boundaries?

      I make magic a damaging thing for characters to mess with just because that feels logical and convincing to me. I'd be writing about a fake magic -- fake to me, anyway -- if I made it benevolent or even neutral.

      But I wouldn't advise a writer who sees magic as a nice thing to try to change the way he deals with it! I don't think you can fake these things. I've known writers who try in their stories to endorse moral correctnesses they don't actually care about, or which they even feel to be invalid, just to make their work more palatable to perceived readers' tastes, and it never works. Your fiction is going to reflect what you actually believe and don't believe, and it'd be a mistake for Rowling, for example, to vilify magic just because people think it ought to be vilified. They may be right and she may be wrong, but it's her eyes we're looking through when we experience the story.

      Joan Didion said that "art is hostile to ideology." Fiction can be educational and beneficial and improving, but that's not one of its jobs!

* * *

Your stories often begin after the death of an important character—frequently a female character whose death sets the plot in motion. Is this a consequence of writing stories that often involve ghosts, is it just a good place to begin stories, or is it a personal trademark?

      I guess it's just a personal quirk! I really wasn't aware of it till you pointed it out. I guess it's a natural way to get into a dramatic situation -- the reader learns about this deleted person from seeing how the other characters react to her (generally her) sudden absence, and when a mystery becomes evident she's not there to explain it, and they've got to try to reconstruct what she secretly knew or what she was actually up to.

      And yes, in stories of mine her ghost is likely to show up and have some comments!

* * *

Your stories often end with the creation of new families by characters who aren’t initially part of the same family. Is this a crypto pro-family statement that you’re trying to get across, does it play a specific dramatic function, or is it something that you just find interesting?

      I suppose it plays a dramatic function, in that it's putting together a new orderliness, with optimistic promise, out of the ruins of what had been there before the story's catastrophes started. Like, "Things won't be the same, but they'll be nice in a different way." And I generally get fond of my characters, and I want them to have nice lives after the book's spotlight isn't on them anymore!

* * *

Your previous novel, Declare, came out in 2001 and 3DTN has come out in 2006. You’re not going to make us wait until 2011 for another Tim Powers novel are you?

      I hope not! No, no, definitely not. This one was slowed down by me teaching two high school classes and one or two college classes every semester, and I'm going to cut back on that, I swear.

* * *

ORDER THREE DAYS TO NEVER--OR OTHER WORKS BY TIM POWERS--FROM JIMMY AKIN'S STORE.

Comments

[derringdo]

That last reassurance is good to hear, especially since his next book, joking dubbed "Tess of the Baskervilles" in some interviews, is set in Victorian times and he said he was going to be reading the Sherlock Holmes stories through that Tim Powers lens as part of his research. I'm very curious to see what comes out of that :)

[Jeff Miller]

Great interview Jimmy! I loved both your questions and Tim's answers. I have read a string of his books after your first mentioning him on your blog and I have not been dissapointed.

In his new novel does he include a segment at the end explaining the true historical details as he did at the end of Declare?

[Pseudomodo]

Weird character names...

I remember that Bill Lear of Lear Jet fame named his daughter Shanda.

[derringdo]

Pseudomodo: what an evil, evil man. :)

[Gene Branaman]

Pseudomodo, I'd always heard her full name was Crystal Shandra Lear.

Not that it makes it any better.

And are there any major spoilers in the interview? I don't wanna ruin the book. Thanks.

A friend recently recommended "The Anubis Gate" to me, now it looks like I need to run out and buy all his books.

--arthur

[SDG]

Real magic should be as scary as an earthquake, even if it's "good" magic.

Well said. This sounds like the same sensibility Lewis brought to the character of Aslan: "Safe? Who said anything about safe? Course he isn't safe. But he's good... If anyone can look Aslan in the face without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most or else just plain silly."

Yes, I think Lovecraft was too conservative. The thing we want to show the reader is that there's a whole world of unsuspected stuff going on -- when Leeuwenhoek first looked into his microscope, he didn't see just one weird new creature, but dozens of them!

Interesting. I think it's all about different approaches to creating suspension of disbelief to different outlooks: Perhaps the early 20th-century outlook found it easier to accept an otherwise rationalistic universe with one dissonant element, whereas what makes more sense to a turn-of-the-21st-century mindset is a universe that is more mysterious in myriad ways than we suspected.

Joan Didion said that "art is hostile to ideology." Fiction can be educational and beneficial and improving, but that's not one of its jobs!

Wow is this true. And wow do Christians artists today have a hard time "getting" this, which is why we tend to produce such crappy art.

Mark, this is not to say that art is not about truth. It can and it should. But it has to be about the artist's own quest to apprehend and express truth, not about the artist's desire to ensure that other people Get It the way the artist does.

So, in a way, I actually do think after all that it is one of fiction's jobs to be educational and beneficial and improving -- provided that it is himself or herself that the artist is trying to improve and benefit first of all, and that he or she does so in a spirit of absolute honesty and creative integrity, not working from a presumption of having arrived and being in the position of an enlightener of the benighted.

[Elliot]

This is great!
Thanks very much for conducting and posting this interview!

[Jimmy Akin]

And are there any major spoilers in the interview?

No. There are no major spoilers in the interview or in my review of the book. I made a point of keeping the big surprises under wraps, and Tim did, too, in his answers..

[Joy Schoenberger]

Jimmy, I really liked your question about obviously significant character names harming suspension of disbelief. I can recall two books off the top of my head, one where the main character was named Michael Archangelo, and one where the main guy was named, get this...

Hero Protagonist.

Ugh.

(BTW, the first is from Wyrm by Mark Fabi, the second from Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson)

[CaeliDS]

Thanks for getting me excited about reading/writing fiction again. Tim's approach bends genres in a way I never thought about before.

BTW, has anyone read those novels from The Mary Foundation, "House of Gold," and all that? Are they any good?

[Monica]

re: house of gold etc.

Literarily speaking, no. I enjoyed those mildly while I was reading them, but could never bring myself to pick them up for a 2nd reading.

[Jeff Miller]

CaeliDS,

Those novels by Bud Macfarlane Jr are just passable fair. He is an okay writer with somewhat interesting characters in novels that are overtly Catholic. I read them in the early days of conversion days when I would only read explicity Catholic fiction. There literary quality is a step up from something like those Left Behind books, but not by much.

[Gene Branaman]

"There are no major spoilers in the interview or in my review of the book. I made a point of keeping the big surprises under wraps, and Tim did, too, in his answers."

Thanks, Jimmy - I knew I could count on you!

[Leah]

Regarding the Macfarlane novels - I read all three when I was on the road to the Catholic Church, and what I liked about them was that they really put me in a "Catholic" world, with people that were "very Catholic". Not something I experienced in real life.

But I highly recommend Father Elijah and Michael O'Brien's other novels. Excellent! He's quite an artist, too.

[Tim M.]

I completely agree with Leah. I absolutely love the "Children of the Last Days" series by Michael D. O'Brien and highly recommend it to anyone.

I read the first three books of the "Left Behind" 25-ilogy series as some of the last books I read as a Protestant during my journey home. I had to put down the fourth one because, as literature, IMHO, it absolutely is as nutritious as sawdust. It was so fluffy and detail inconsistent that it seemed crystal clear to me that they were just pumping them out in a money making machine (let's make a buck in Jesus' name!).

When I read "Father Elijah" I was so struck by the quality of the literature, and from a Catholic worldview. This is one of my favourite books of all time! Yes, give me a Dostoyevsky anytime over a LeHaye.

Thank you also for the suggestions earlier that introduced me to Connie Willis. I started with Doomsday Book and have gone from there.

[SDG]

Those novels by Bud Macfarlane Jr are just passable fair. He is an okay writer with somewhat interesting characters in novels that are overtly Catholic. I read them in the early days of conversion days when I would only read explicity Catholic fiction. There literary quality is a step up from something like those Left Behind books, but not by much.

I think you are being very, very, very, very kind.

[MissJean]

I have to disagree with the idea that fiction and ideology don't mix. I am recommending Russell Kirk's collected short stories "Ancestral Shadows". He is the most overtly Catholic writer of ghost stories I have ever read. My favourites of his are probably "Lex Talionis", "Sorworth Place", and two really beautiful stories that work together "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" and "Watchers at the Strait Gate".

Also, there's a character in "The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion" that is a lot like the werewolf in The Anubis Gates.

[Tim Powers]

Hello, Miss Jean!

Well there are exceptions, yes! C. S. Lewis's space trilogy is a prominent example. But I'd insist -- till somebody points out an exception -- that the ideology has to be secondary to the story math. I don't think I've read Russell Kirk -- I'll have to try him out, thanks!

One overtly Catholic book that has struck me as very good -- maybe because I first read it when I was very young -- is Francis J. Finn's _Percy Wynn._ Published about a hundred years ago, but in print. It's what they'd call YA now -- adventures in a Catholic boys' school, with lots of treachery and rescues and last-minute repentances. It's been a couple of years at least -- I'm due to read it again.

[Sean S.]

I need to get me a copy...I loved Declare. I need to read more Powers in general, actually.

You should come to OddCon again, Tim! Then I could get your John Hancock on it....

[Moshe]

For real Kabbalah, to compliment this book and your research, and real Orthodox Judaism
check out:

www.chabad.org

www.inner.org

www.askmoses.com

www.meaningfullife.com

www.kabbalahonline.org

You will learn many secrets, many wonders

Baruch Hashem

[Bradamante]

Would this author be a good choice for a middle school reader? I've got a kid who's always book-hungry!

[Sean S.]

Bradamante:

Depends on the book. I'd say most of Tim Powers probably isn't appropriate for a kid that young--there is some sex in most of his books--not graphic or gratuitous, but I think it would be too much for a pre-teen. They can also get very dark and horrific, and some kids might be confused by the handling of supernatural matters. Part of it depends on the kid, of course.

So...Powers is an incredible author, and I think his work is deeply moral, but I wouldn't recommend it for young readers.

The possible exception, from what I've read, would be The Drawing of the Dark, one of his earlier books. It has less content/scariness than the others.

Of course, it all depends on your kid and what you think he's ready for.

[MomLady]

Bradamante,

I've always had a low tolerance for what my husband used to call "Saxon Violins," yet I've never felt soiled after reading a Tim Powers novel despite the horrendous things that befall his protagonists.

However, I would NOT recomend his works to a middle-school reader. As Brother William of Baskerville once said, "herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not good for a young Benedictine."

[MomLady]

Tim Powers:

I've just finished reading _Tom Playfair--Or Making a Start_, the first in that series by Francis J. Finn. So _Percy Wynn_ is next on my list. The former had been described to me as a Catholic _Tom Brown's School Days_, and since I adore 19th century children's literature, I had to read it. It was a lot of fun, especially the chapter in which Tom and his friends decide to exorcise the school bully.

[Joy Schoenberger]

Tim M, glad you hear you're enjoying Connie Willis. She really is an original and interesting writer.

I agree with everyone here on the MacFarlane books. I read them in High School and was impressed, but have since reevaluated as my literary taste has improved. I never read the Left Behind books, but I'd guess that they're of a similar nature. One thing I'll say for MacFarlane, though, is that they did inspire my Aunt to return to a more full involvement in the Catholic Church, including having her first marriage annulled, and her second convalidated. Never underestimate the power of God to work through the least of His servants, even the cheesy author types. :-)

[derringdo]

Fr. Finn wrote about five billion books in the Tom Playfair/Percy Wynn vein, and all the ones I remember reading were pretty good.

The Father Elijah books are very decent for what they are, but no way in hades are they Dostoyevsky.

Tim Powers: I think you'll like Russell Kirk's ghost stories-they get a bit repetitive but the best of them are very good indeed. There's also a novel length piece that functions as a sequel to about five or six of them.

Thanks Sean S. and MomLady, I appreciate your input. Like the old song "How Can You Keep Them Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" how do you follow up "The Lord of the Rings" for a kid? The search continues...

[Bradamante]

Thanks Sean S. and MomLady, I appreciate your input. Like the old song "How Can You Keep Them Down on the Farm After They've Seen Paree?" how do you follow up "The Lord of the Rings" for a kid? The search continues...

[Tim Powers]

MomLady,

As I recall, Tom Playfair was a good book, but Percy Wynn was a _very_ good book. And I do want to get the rest of Finn's books about St. Maure School!

And I'd say a parent should read any book of mine before giving it to a middle-school reader. I gave a copy of a pirate-voodoo-adventure book of mine to my middle-school niece, then re-read it and told her parents to hold onto it for a few years. Kind of embarrassing! I suspect, as Sean S. said, that The Drawing of the Dark would be okay.

I still have to read Father Elijah. I've got a copy, but never actually opened it yet. I just keep re-reading Lewis's That Hideous Strength!

Bradamante,

In the fantasy genre I would recommend for your son _Eragon_ by Christopher Paolini and its sequels (_Eldest_ and the third is not yet released). A _Lord of the Rings_ fan would definitely love those.

Tim Powers' _Drawing of the Dark_ would be a good one, too. Of course there is also _The Hobbit_ if your son has not read it yet.

[MomLady]

"I still have to read Father Elijah. I've got a copy, but never actually opened it yet. I just keep re-reading Lewis's That Hideous Strength!"

Good choice! I read Father Elijah the summer I had foot surgery. It was a page turner that helped keep my mind off the pain, but was nowhere near as good as _That Hideous Strength_. I picked up some of O'Brien's other novels years ago when I found them remaindered, but I haven't got around to them yet.

[Elliot]

Re: Christian/Catholic fantasy for younger readers... How about _The Devil in a Forest_ by Gene Wolfe?

Or maybe some stories by Zenna Henderson?

[Elliot]

Oh, and I recently learned that Monica Hughes, the young-adult-SF author, was a practicing Catholic. I always liked her work, but didn't pick up on that, though a friend says you can tell.

[MissJean]

Thanks for the reply, Mr. Powers. I wasn't really arguing with your POV so much as trying to engage SDG in a debate. It's one of life's little pleasures. :P

For young readers, I recommend Elizabeth Coatsworth's "The Wanderers" about an Irish monk and his two charges. Also, if you can find anything by him, Padraic Colum was a great writer and recipient of the Regina Award. "The Children Who Followed the Piper" and "The King of Ireland's Son" are really beautiful and oftentimes haunting.

Oh, and I HEARTILY recommend "The Saint's Bones" by Mark Edwards. It's the first book in a series about a group of students at St. Adalbert’s High School who have supernatural powers. This first book is about how the gang must defeat an evil general and his army of walking dead. There are also mutant animals, a mean football coach, and Sister Methusaleh. The Catholic references are matter-of-fact. It's a lot of fun and, despite it being a fantasy, its depiction of teenaged boys is realistic. :) In other words, no sex or drugs, but a lot of football and goofing around.

[Bradamante]

Thanks again, everyone!

[John G]

I recently read "Powers of Two," which contained Tim Powers' first two books--The Skies Discrowned and An Epitaph of Rust.

They were both good, competent sci-fi stories (set in the future, unlike most of his works), and I don't recall anything in them that would be inappropriate for children, though of couse parents are always the best judge of that.

[John G]

Both of these books are shorter than most of those Tim writes, which is why they could fit in a single volume.

[Jeremy S.]

Excellent interview! I just finished 3DTN yesterday and it was one of your best! (But they're all amazing!) And I hope one day we all can see that Last Call script get produced....

[Adam Greenwood]

Re Father Elijah:

Totally creepy, if I recall, but not deliberately. The more I read the more I kept thinking that Mr. O'Brien had some pretty dank corners to his soul. Brrr. But I'm not Catholic, so take that FWIW (for comparison purposes, I love Tim Powers and Flannery O'Connor, so I don't think its just O'Brien's Catholic sensibility that disturbs me).

[gay bareback sex]

Doesn`t matter what you say, but how...!! But you said it well http://gay-anal-sex.jimka-mmsa.com

[Ruth]

Just finished reading 3DTN today and feel I must share this incredible sentence from it:

"During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn darkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk's taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead." (p. 390; NY: Harper Collins, 2006).

This is so quintessentially Tim Powers that I'm beside myself. We are, (in one sentence mind), cocooned into a magical detailed moment (this 'moving pocket of warmth') swept out to the wider world ('the lonely rock studded hills') and swept out further still ('the remote tilted alluvial deltas'), re-oriented just in time with the mundane ('a dozen trailer trucks') and then gracefully returned to the all-too-human protagonists (Malk's taillights) who are caught in something infinite ('the empty lane ahead.')

In fact I would venture to call this sentence poetic for it even has internal semiotic structure, beginning as it does, with a pair of glowing cigarettes and ending in the twin red dots of Malk's taillights.

I have read that Powers is wary of the author's presence being felt in a novel--he feels it disrupts the fabric of the novel if we readers are constantly saying 'what a great sentence! what a damn fine writer.'

But...what a damn fine writer.

[Ruth]

Just finished reading 3DTN today and feel I must share this incredible sentence from it:

"During the drive from San Bernardino to Palm Springs, the van had been a moving pocket of warmth and dashboard lights and a pair of glowing cigarettes in the lonely rock-studded hills in the predawn darkness, and the only signs of human habitation in the landscape of jagged ridges and remote, tilted alluvial deltas had been one line of half a dozen trailer trucks pulled off on the shoulder, and the twin red dots of Malk's taillights in the otherwise empty lane ahead." (p. 390; NY: Harper Collins, 2006).

This is so quintessentially Tim Powers that I'm beside myself. We are, (in one sentence mind), cocooned into a magical detailed moment (this 'moving pocket of warmth') swept out to the wider world ('the lonely rock studded hills') and swept out further still ('the remote tilted alluvial deltas), re-oriented just in time with the mundane ('a dozen trailer trucks) and then gracefully returned to the all-too-human protagonists (Malk's taillights) who are caught in something infinite (the empty lane ahead.)

In fact I would venture to call this sentence potric for it even has internal semiotic structure, beginning as it does, with a pair of glowing cigarettes and ending in the twin red dots of Malk's taillights.

I have read that Powers is wary of the author's presence being felt in a novel--he feels it disrupts the fabric of the novel if we readers are constantly going 'what a great sentence! what a damn fine writer.'

But...what a damn fine writer.

[Sandra Miesel]

In 7th grade, my younger daughter loved THE DRAWING OF THE DARK so much, she wrote a ballad about it, memorable for rhyming "wizard" and "gizzard."

Zenna Henderson was an excellent Christian writer. Her Pilgrimage series was recently collected in one volume.

For medieval fantasy mild enough for a middle-schooler, try Poul Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS whic has a Catholic angle.

[Sandra Miesel]

In 7th grade, my younger daughter loved THE DRAWING OF THE DARK so much, she wrote a ballad about it, memorable for rhyming "wizard" and "gizzard."

Zenna Henderson was an excellent Christian writer. Her Pilgrimage series was recently collected in one volume.

For medieval fantasy mild enough for a middle-schooler, try Poul Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS whic has a Catholic angle.