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On Stranger Tides
Tim Powers
Internet Top 100

For me, one of the sure signs of how much I've liked a story is how I feel during the last 50 pages. Frequently, I'm impatient to finish so I can get on to something else. On the other hand, with the best books, at this point it's hard and sometimes even tortuous to stop reading. With On Stranger Tides, it wasn't extremely hard to stop reading but I definitely wasn't impatient. In fact, when it did end I felt sad - I would have like the story to keep going.

We have swashbuckling adventures, highly imaginative settings and characters, suspense, humor, intellectual challenge, strangeness, and fun - it's a great book. Here's an example with several of these traits all in the same sentence: "Davies' words had upset Shandy, and not least because they seemed to take the righteousness out of the purpose he's crossed the ocean for - suddenly his uncle's action seemed as impersonally pragmatic as the devouring of the baby sea turtles by the hungry sea gulls, and his own mission as ill-considered as an attempt to teach the gulls compassion."

Power's use of language condenses emotion and vividly conveys experience - "This time he was so terrified that he felt drunk - all colors were too vivid, all sounds too loud, he felt suspended halfway between weeping and vomiting, and he had to keep thinking about not wetting his pants." His metaphor and imagery make events seem to jump off the page - "Their bare feet, shuffling across the deck, made sounds like someone rolling dead toads down a shingled roof." "Its body smelled like unfresh fish and felt like chains and jelly in a wet leather bag".

And while many plot elements stretch our imagination to the limits, the underlying logic maintains a consistent believability: "Serious vodun attacks are generally directed at, and take place in, the memories of the defensive combatant, the memories being the accumulated sum of a person."

Tim Powers, much like his friend, Philip K. Dick, remains a relatively undiscovered literary giant.

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