Ryan M. Patrick

I’ve written about Tim Powers before, mostly in my Me and the Fantasy Genre and Top 10 Favorite Books posts, but I wanted to do a deep dive into his books and why there is almost nothing else like his works out there. I’m going to make this a monthly thing – go in depth into one of my favorite authors and help me meet one of my 2026 goals of 1 blog post/week. I won’t go into biographical details or anything like that (we all have access to Wikipedia), I’ll just talk about my relationship with their stories and why they work so well for me.

And Powers is an interesting one to start with. He’s my favorite living American author, yet he doesn’t write sci-fi or technothrillers. And it seems like no one has ever heard of him; yet he has a Hollywood adaptation of one of his novels and his influence on the modern SF/F landscape is undeniable. And I cannot stop recommending him to people both in person and online.

How I Found this Author

In a very roundabout way!

I checked Mark Frost’s The List of 7 out of the school library at Salesianum when I was 16 or 17 on a total whim – I was bored, out of stuff to read, and the front cover and flap summary seemed cool (Arthur Conan Doyle is the main character, stopping a Victorian-era supernatural conspiracy). I was absolutely blown away, finished it in like 2 days, and then asked the school librarian for some more books like it; the author hadn’t really written much else like it. She suggested a bunch of books – most of which were crap – but the one that had a name that leap out at me was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.

You can probably guess why I liked the title from a post from last month. Anubis is a primary villain in Stargate SG-1! But I went online and checked it out and when my birthday rolled around, I asked for a bunch of books, to include The Anubis Gates.

And it did not disappoint. For as good as The List of 7 is, The Anubis Gates is better – deeper, better prose, better characters – in every single way. It’s a time travel story, yet it’s more than that, and it ties in religion and mythology and even some steampunk elements (Powers & some of his friends are the fathers of the subgenre!) and it ties into a secret history that makes it feel like “it could have happened” yet covered up – there’s nothing in it that

I read it, but then the only other Powers I could get my hands on was Last Call at the Chester County Library and it just wasn’t for me (more on this later). But I never forgot the author’s name. Unfortunately, like I’ve talked about before, I didn’t read as much my first two/two-and-a-half years at USAFA, but when I did pick reading back up he was the first author I started with. And I was not disappointed – I started with Declare (one of my all-time top 10 favorite books), and then moved on to On Stranger Tides and The Stress of Her Regard. And over the course of a year or two I read everything he had put out, and I’ve read every book by him pretty much on release. And I have rarely, if ever, been disappointed.

Why I Love His Books

They’re for the most part “secret histories,” which I absolutely love as a concept. At their core, they take the real world we all know—actual people, documented events, verified dates—and slip in a hidden supernatural layer that explains the weird bits without ever contradicting the history books. He even has major historical characters (Percy Shelley, Kim Philby, etc) as main characters.

The result feels like you’re finally seeing the secret machinery under reality itself. It’s not “fantasy set in the past”—it’s our past, with the curtain pulled back just enough to make you wonder if some of it might actually be true. And to top it off, Powers is Catholic – like me – and has deep religious themes in most if not all of his books. But they’re subtle; someone who isn’t Catholic or Christian can still enjoy the book. They just won’t get as much out of it.

That’s exactly why it hooks me harder than pure secondary-world stuff (like I talked about in my fantasy post). This is hard – it takes a ton of research, plotting, and knowledge to pull it off. And not everyone can do it. There are very few authors writing like him (more on that later).

But you also need a good story, and there’s no bad ones (outside of some of the earlier sci-fi adjacent stuff in his bibliography, which you can skip) in the whole catalog. They’re all different – Declare is a Le Carré-style espionage thriller, The Stress of Her Regard is horror, the recent Vickery and Castine series is X-Files adjacent more similar to Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child’s stuff. And they all have characters that leap off of the page, protagonists that have to suffer and sacrifice to get what they want, and deep antagonists that never cackle or do evil for the sake of evil. The pacing is always spot-on and the prose is as good as anyone else in the business.

Which Books I’d Recommend

I would start with Declare. it’s that good.

But honestly go through and see what the setting/plot is and pick one that appeals to you. I bounced off of Last Call hard as a 17-year-old but when I reattacked it a decade later I loved it, especially after having spent some time TDY to Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The Fault Lines series isn’t my favorite of Powers’ stuff, I think it’s a bit plodding compared to the tightly-paced The Anubis Gates, but it’s still great.

And if you want to read his more-recent stuff, My Brother’s Keeper was great (Brontë sisters & werewolves!) and The Mills of the Gods is one of the best books I’ve ever read – it’s The Sun Also Rises but supernatural and written from a very Catholic perspective and the ending is just perfect. There’s not really any books I didn’t enjoy other than Powers of Two and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (the aforementioned SF that I didn’t like). But if I had to give a list of my favorites that were also good starting places:

• Declare
• The Stress of Her Regard
• On Stranger Tides
• The Anubis Gates
• My Brother’s Keeper
• Three Days to Never
• The Milss of the Gods

And if you’re interested in listening to him talk, Powers was on a podcast a few months back talking about The Mills of the Gods that you can listen to here:

Impact on My Own Writing

I’ve talked about this a ton, but I write a lot because there’s gaps – there’s books I want to read but I can’t find them out there. But I’m primarily a sci-fi and technothriller guy, yet I love Powers’ stuff for the same reason I love those genres. Just replace technical accuracy with historical research and rigor and that’s his stuff.

Yet he seems to be the only one writing novels like that! Some of his comrades (James Blaylock, K.W. Jeter) are close; and the Mark Frost novel that got me started on this subgenre and its sequel are the only ones I’ve found that fit the “secret history” type thing that I like. Most turn into alternate history like Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or the Laundry Files by Charles Stross, which had a writing style I didn’t enjoy and also are a bit too unbelievable.

So I’m going to do my own take on the concept. They’re “secret histories,” but for the most part I’m going shy away from well-known characters or events (unlike Mr. Powers). Instead, I’m focusing on smaller-scale stories for my “third rail,” adding another branch to my sci-fi and technothriller novels.

Memento Vivere will be the first – it’s what I’m currently working on and I’m 38 chapters done out of a planned 56. It’s set in the area I grew up in, Chester County, PA, and it’s a story I’ve always wanted to tell. A GWOT veteran comes back for his grandfather’s funeral and finds an ancient grimoire in the attic, then learns that he can cast spells. But an evil, ancient conspiracy has its grips in the community and has worldwide (and greater) aims and he has to fight them off with the help of a mysterious woman from his past. It’s a self-insert story, one of my very few, and it’s incredibly personal and ties into Catholicism, proto-Indo-European language and migrations, quantum mechanics, and all kinds of other stuff and I can’t wait to get it done later this year. And at its core it’s a Tim Powers-style story, just written by a kid from the Philly suburbs rather than a guy who’s spent most of his life in California!

And I have a whole bunch of these stories queued up – Black Sails & Sorcery is On Stranger Tides and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag with a revenge story like that in The Count of Monte Cristo, Dead Reckoning is a “Tim Powers beach read” set at the Jersey Shore, No Man’s Hell is a WWI thriller where a lone American solider must close a gate to Hell that’s opened on a desolate battlefield, and The Druid of Albuquerque features a Catholic monk who protects the city from the dangers of the American Southwest. These are fun to outline and write, and the best part is that they’re not subject to the Pentagon prepublication review process that has been the bane of my existence for the last year.

Summary

Moral of the story: read more Tim Powers! And if you have any recommendations for books like his, send them my way – I have tried for years and never really found much that hit like his do. Finally, I hope to have Memento Vivere out this year, but we’ll see. Given how this year has gone, it’ll probably be a very-early 2027 release!

Next up in August: the man, the myth, the legend: Tom Clancy