A Tour of Tim Powers: The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust

I had a lot of time on my hands recently, being home with the ‘flu for a solid week; and when I’m home sick I usually start chain-reading. “Chain-reading” is a neologism of my own design, but I assume the meaning is obvious: I read a book, and when I turn the last page I open another book, and so on. The primary difficulty associated with chain-reading is deciding what the next book will be, so I often wind up picking a favorite author and starting at one end of the list.

Toward the end of the week I settled on Tim Powers as the next victim, and settled down to read his oldest works in order of publication.

Powers’ first two books, The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust, were originally published in 1976 by a short-lived imprint of Harlequin books called “Laser Books”. I remember seeing various Laser titles at the local bookstore; they had a distinctive look, where the cover painting of each featured the head and shoulders of the main character superimposed over the scene. I never bought one of them; the covers looked a little cheesy, and there was always something else I’d rather spend my (all too scarce) money on. Laser Books had a habit of heavily editing the author’s words to fit a page count, and apparently both books suffered from this, one of them excessively. Both The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust are now available in one volume with their complete original text as Powers wrote them.

The Skies Discrowned takes place in the far future, in a galactic empire that is winding down and going to seed. Technology is regressing, and gentlemen are beginning to once again resort to the sword rather than the gun. The book follows a young man named Frank Rovzar into the underworld (literally) of a planet called Octavio, there to join the Thieve’s Guild and eventually lead a revolution against Duke Costa and the minions of the Transport Authority. The result is an odd mix: science fiction, not fantasy, but with a distinct feel of sword and sorcery (without the sorcery) on the one hand, and Victorian steampunk (without the mechanical contraptions) on the other. It isn’t a great book but it has some nice moments, and I was happy to make its acquaintance once again. (For the record, it was republished in the 1980’s as Forsake the Sky.)

Epitaph in Rust, by contrast, takes place much closer to home: right here in Los Angeles, albeit in a post-apocalypic future. A young lad named Thomas escapes from a monastery somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, having stolen some ready money from a bird man, a sort of genetically-engineered semi-human jackdaw with the help of a kite and a fishing pole. He heads south into the L.A. basin, and finds shelter with a theater troupe. Revolution is once again in the air; Los Angeles is its own principality, and the mayor has replaced the entire police force with “androids”, humanoid bio-robots grown in vats that are loyal only to him. There have been altercations, and anti-android sentiments are growing. Everything is new to Thomas, our young naïf, and we see it all through his eyes.

Both books are readable, though unremarkable; and I found them interesting mostly because of the elements carried forward into Powers’ later books. Epitaph in Rust is clearly drawing from the same well as Power’s fifth book, the much more interesting and complex Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, and the underground scenes from The Skies Discrowned would be at home in a number of Power’s books.

If you’re a Powers fan and haven’t read these, you might want to; and if you’re not familiar with Powers then keep your eye on this spot; there are some much better books coming up.