Strange Itineraries by Tim Powers

Tim Powers is an old favourite on this blog, and it was with a little, sad, shock that I realised not long ago that I had finally obtained and read all of his books, from his first pot-boiling written-to-length novels to his recent masterwork Declare.

Imagine how pleased I was, then, to read that a collection of Powers' rare short fiction was in the offing. I ordered it immediately, and months went by. Amazon kept emailing me with apologies for the delay, asking if I wanted to keep my order on the system. And then, finally, Strange Itineraries arrived.

It's skimpy, at just over 200 pages, but can be enjoyed at a leisurely pace. For example, I read the first story in the collection and immediately re-read it, enjoying it a second time with no pause in between.

What you get for your money is a taster of the weird world of Powers. The opening story features a man who receives an odd phone-call from a rasp-throated stranger, gets badly injured by a gas explosion at his house, and then finds himself living in the weird space of his uncle's old home, where a couple of cases of cold beer might appear from some space-time wormhole at any moment. (Only, with Powers, you don't get SF language like "space-time" or "wormhole." Instead you get "mirage", or some such analogue equivalent.)

In another story, a motorist picks up a hitch-hiker, gets offended by something he says, kicks him out of the car, and then picks the same man up again a few miles down the road. Only it's earlier, not later, and they haven't met yet. Er...

A priest sits down to take confessions, whilst worrying about a previous session in which a parishioner tied him in doctrinal knots with legalistic spiritual arguments. "But you can't absolve me if..." And what if the sin is suicide, and the parishioner is some kind of ghost?

There's often a trick to these stories, a doubling back, a repeat and reverse, which in the short story form works less effectively than it does in his longer works. Ghosts and pilgrims collide, and you get a brief taster of the world-within-the-world that is the Powers milieu. Not as good as his novels, but still good enough for the fan, and an ideal introduction for one who wants to dip a toe.

On this subject, I was discussing yesterday with friends how Science Fiction is incredibly popular, but that often people unfamiliar with the breadth, depth, and variety of SF didn't know they liked it. Desperate Housewives: narrated by a dead woman. Lost: strange things going on on that island (a polar bear in the tropics?). Magic Realism in literature: SF by another name, which is where Tim Powers emerges. If his novels have too much page-turning plot to be considered truly literary, then these short stories are probably respectably obscure.