Collect Strange Itineraries Narrated By Tim Powers In PDF

review of this wonderful book is up at The Internet Science Fiction,

sitelink irosf. com/q/zine/article/

I completely missed the point on most of these stories, I was confused and most stories feel rushed and too crammed with ideas, I love Tim Powers but I am not sure his short works are for me, Oh well. Tried to buy On Stranger Tides by the same author, but neither library nor bookstore had it available, Picked up this short story collection instead, Mostly horror/dark fantasy. Pretty good. Ghosts, accidental time travel, a secret clan of immortals, and Maxwell's Demon are all subjects in this complete collection of short stories by Tim Powers.
Elusive and evocative, these stories are excursions into strange and dangerous worlds and are as colorful and inventive as Powers's novels, A pioneer of the popular "Steampunk" genre of speculative fiction, his complex and tightly researched "secret histories" blend with compelling fantastical elements to create some of today's most memorable modern science fiction.


Contents
“Itinerary”
“Night Moves”
“Pat Moore”
“The Way Down the Hill”
“Through and Through”
“Where They Are Hid”
“Fifty Cents”
“The Better Boy”
“We Traverse Afar” I had heard much about Tim Powers for a while.
I even had a couple of his novels, But I decided to get a copy of his short story collection and read it first a few years ago, I think this turned out to be a bad idea, Though I still did enjoy this collection on a few levels,

This, as far as I know, is his only published collection of short stories, He is primarily a novel writer, and I think it showed in this collection, A lot of great ideas that needed more time to get fleshed out, There was one story that to me screamed the need to be a novel, or even just a novella, His style is modern/urban fantasy, with a penchant for writing in the past, Usually in the's,'s and's,

Here is the rundown of stories:

"Itinerary"
"The Way Down the Hill"
"Pat Moore"
"Fifty Cents" cowritten with James P.
Blaylock
"Through and Through"
"We Traverse Afar" cowritten with James P, Blaylock
"Where They Are Hid"
"The Better Boy" cowritten with James P, Blaylock
"Night Moves"

My favorite of the nine stories was "The Way Down the Hill", It could have easily been longer, but still was satisfying at it's length, It deals with a division of humans among us that are reincarnated, Many even commit suicide when things get tough in old age, because who after all wants to go through that hell One recent addition and recent meaningyears ago to the clan becomes it's leader, but has created a bit of a shake up amongst the other brethren.
After years of missing their regularly scheduled meetings, one of it's members gets caught up in a coup of sorts,

I thought "Pat Moore" was decent, but that was the story that needed more, It has a very surreal feel at times, and could have easily been much, much longer, "Itinerary" was a great time travel type story that really confused me, But how he tied all the issues together really impressed me, "The Better Boy" was an odd tale of a man obsessed with his tomato plants, and using frozen ether to save them from the worms.
I found parts of it interesting and just a good story, and other parts just not interesting at all, maybe even pointless, Though some of that may have come from the character development, which in that case is a credit to Powers' skill, Or Blaylock's, since it was cowritten with him,

I read a review on Amazon, Com where the reader backed up my feelings that Powers is a great novelist and it shows at times in this collection, Though he still gave the book astar rating, Insert eye rolling smiley I, on the other hand, have never read any of Powers' novels, though have a few on my shelves, Again, I think his writing style lends itself to novel writing, Though overall, this wasn't a bad read, Ok, I didn't like these as much as the stories in The Bible Repairman, These stories are based on the same premise which Tim Powers tends to do well ordinary, everyday people in fantastical situations who find themselves somehow crossing from this world into the supernatural.
Time travel, ghosts, science. The blurry line between life and death, Yet perhaps because of their length the stories sometimes ramble on, and the characters are a little confusing and less sympathetic, There are one or two gems in here, but the rest, while wellwritten, didn't really grab me all that much, I give this story high marks for inventive weirdness, but not much in the way of plot, It felt like it would have been a good stage to set a story in, but the story was missing, Fantasy I don't know why I was surprised to find Tim Power's stories so full of ghosts, Time travel loops, yeah, the odd immortal, lots of Catholicism, sure, but so many ghosts, after a Christmas full of listening to MR James stories it caught me on the hop.
They're great, though, weird, ingenious, chilling and unpredictable, and I'm really coming to apreciate his use of California as a setting, a place I've always found drab and opressively overlit in appearance whenever it turns up on TV and films, which it does a lot, like an open plan office without a roof well suited to noir, oddly enough when used well, and now for ghost stories like these.
Very enjoyable. Barged through them at high speed, but still

thinking about them, Interesting collection of Tim Powers short stories, A number of the stories reminded me of Last Call, Declare and Three Days to Never among others, Enjoyable if you are in the right frame of mind, I started reading stories from this when I lost my book for a couple days, Decided to finish it but unfortunately it was a waste of time, Many of the stories just don't make any sense or have any kind of conclusion,

We Traverse Afar with James P, Blaylock This was rather dark and not much really happened, About a widower, hanging out hating life, I guess there's supposed to be some hope in the last line but it didn't do much for me,.

The Better Boy with James P, Blaylock Kind of absurd, southern, scifi ala The Astronaut Farmer, Not sure I completely understood the concept of th ether bunnies but it was kinda fun and there was a very touching moment near the end.
.

Through and through A priest has to decide whether he can peform rights to absolve a ghost of her sins, Never said what her actual sin was, No "punchline"

The Way Down the Hill Cool setup but very confusing because characters had their gender and then the gender of their body was often different.
.

Night Moves Very cool setup, interesting characters, but not real explanation, Quirky/distracting metaphors

Itinerary Strange, not sure exactly what it was about, but seemed to be someone who was nuts telling a story, so it didn't really make sense.


Pat Moore Gave up after aboutpages,.

Where They Are Hid Another I should have given up on, I hate time travel.

Fifty Cents Might have been good if there was any kind of explanation, instead it was just a bunch of nonsense,This is a collection of short stories by Tim Powers, Some are naturally better than others, the first was very hard to comprehend, but that's just him, One of these stories in particular was incredible, and it will probably stay with me for a very long time, This is a collection of short fiction by Powers, three of which were written in collaboration with James P, Blaylock. Like his longer works, most of these stories are thoughtprovoking in that much of the story and backstory is implied, rather than laid out for the reader, so they're capable of being interpreted on different levels through various layers of the narrrative.
His recurrent topics of ghosts, timetravel, and religion are featured in the best of this volume, If I'd stopped after four or five I would have given four,
But then the stories stopped working for me, and indeed became boring,
I skipped the last two,

But those early ones were great brainstretchers, easy to read but challenging to comprehend, .