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Earthquake Weather
Tim Powers
Locus '98 fantasy

Characters from both Last Call and Expiration Date meet in a stirring continuation and conclusion to both stories. Too hard to follow if you haven't read the first two books but a great story if you have (though not quite as good as either one).

In the villain role, a deeply decadent, ghost-eating psychologist who "favored the quick 'buying the pharm' attitude toward mental illness over the long, tormenting, dangerous routines of psychotherapy" and gobbled dissociative disorders "the tastiest maladies he could cure...short of curing somebody of their very life, of course which was ethically problematic".

As usual, Powers stretches our imagination in strange but believable ways while adding humorous quips like "If you insist on the world being logical at every turn, you'll eventually be forced to retreat all the way into genuine insanity". He also spices up the story with little known facts like Yerba Buena being the original name for San Francisco and "Goats have horizontal pupils because they look from side to side, mostly, and cats have vertical pupils because they're always looking up and down."

And typical Powers outlandish but logical theories magnify the depth and fascination level: "'Windshield' - the olden times word for 'widdershins' ... It means moving counterclockwise, to elude magical pursuit."; "The Law of Imperative Resemblance ... Idiosyncratic outlines ... if you resemble it closely enough ... It arrives upon you."

Tim Powers - not well-known outside the world of science fiction/fantasy but one of the great literary voices of our time.

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