I often wonder how Tim Powers concocts the base premise for each of his books. Does it strike him in a blinding flash of insight, or does he slowly tease it together from a sustained mental effort of conceptualisation? Because it seems to me that, for him, devising the central concept to underpin the story almost gets him halfway there. Of course, it would only be the tip of the iceberg as far as the hard work of writing a book goes. But the story premise contains the underpinning appeal of all Powers’ work, and I think it is where his true genius resides.

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We see the stories on the news every day. Criminal proceedings against accused 911 masterminds. Carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes the terrorists even get through the stricter security arrangements restricting all our lives and manage to kill a few innocent civilians. But how do we really fight this war? Gerald Seymour’s The Unknown Soldier shows us how it all works from a variety of angles, and it’s a far cry from James Bond or Steven Seagal. It’s not glamorous. Sometimes it’s downright sordid. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not surprising that the film rights for Altered Carbon were snapped up by Warner Brothers so soon after Richard Morgan’s debut novel was published. This story packs such a solid punch, you can’t help but imagine all the action up on screen in a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. Read the rest of this entry »

Remind me never to go to the North Pole. If the conditions that Dan Simmons describes so meticulously in his latest novel are in any way accurate, it really doesn’t sound like a pleasant place to visit. Extreme cold, hazardous ice floes, frostbite, starvation, scurvy, mutiny, cannibalism: as if that wasn’t enough for these poor sailors to go through, Dan Simmons decides to throw an enormous ice monster into the mix to pick them off one by one. Read the rest of this entry »

The Human Factor is a fictional story about real spies. They don’t drive sports cars, they’re not irresistible lovers, they don’t wield deadly wristwatches and they don’t crash tackle maniacal millionaires over the edges of cliffs only to miraculously climb back up via fortuitously placed tree roots. They sit behind desks, read reports, love their wives and look forward to retirement. And yet, this novel is as gripping as anything from the pen of Matthew Reilly or Ian Fleming, with more intellectual stimulation than either of them, with all due respect, could ever hope to achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are so many crazy, whacked out, brilliant ideas running around in Tim Powers’ head that perhaps his greatest challenge when writing a novel is to keep in control of the outflow. Let the tap out too fast and everything would spill out onto the page willy nilly, and the task of tying all these threads together would be impossible. The multitude of plot strands in Expiration Date, each of which entails at least one weird and funky idea of its own, must have made this a particularly difficult project to keep the lid on.

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