Will I love The Anubis Gates?

My journey with this book came at a young age, recommended to me by my older brother, and was a formative experience. Not only was it an early experience with a more adult version of the fantasy literature I’d grown up reading but it also built a bond between my brother and I, it was a shared literary experience that became special because of who I shared it with.

It opened my eyes to the idea that you could write this kind of stuff for grown-ups, and therefore, a whole new world of reading was opened to me.

This book is hard to sum up and that’s why I love it. What starts out as a time travel story with our protagonist going to the early 1800s leads into a strange world of Romantic poets, werewolves, sorcerers, terrifying clowns in a story that runs between historical fantasy, horror and a comedy of manners, among other things.

In the middle of it all is Brendan Doyle as he tries to negotiate the world of 1810 and find the mysterious poet William Ashbless, while avoiding the bad guys.

One of my favorite things is to throw magic and science fiction… show more.

As a general rule, I don’t like time-travel novels, but I love this one. In Anubis Gates, Tim creates a perfect looping paradox in which our literary historian protagonist finds himself traveling back to the period of his expertise and discovering that every critical beat of his subject matter is both exactly as he learned it and a complete surprise that could only have happened through his own direct intervention.

Talking plot would spoil a beautiful and perfectly constructed puzzle full of mystery and revelation. Tim is a master of interweaving actual historical research with the fantastic, illuminating and personalizing… show more.

Tim Powers is one of my favorite science fiction authors, and The Anubis Gates is probably his best book. As always with Powers, it follows a couple of themes besides time travel, including an Egyptian curse and a malicious puppeteer. The travel mechanism takes into account changes in the landscape since the target time. I particularly enjoyed the use of The Beatles’ "Yesterday" as an out-of-time signaling device.

In the early 1980s Steampunk truly began when a trio of like-minded writers in California formed a loose affinity group, deliberately setting out to write in a mode that would capture some of the feel of Verne and Wells. Good friends K.W. Jeter, James Blaylock, and Tim Powers produced Morlock Night (Jeter), The Anubis Gates (Powers), and The Digging Leviathan (Blaylock). These were hugely influential works in establishing Steampunk as a legitimate sub-genre. And the name? At the time Jeter wrote to Locus, the Science Fiction magazine: "Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the… show more.