Award-winning author, Tim Powers, got to celebrate his actual birthday today, him being a Leap Year baby and all. I’ve been a solid fan of his for three decades and I thought a look at Tim’s more swashbuckling output was called for.

As it so happens, Mr. Powers’ first novel in 1976 was a planetary swashbuckler titled The Skies Discrowned. He hammered it out for Laser Books and got his first paycheck as an author. Tim quit his job at the pizza joint and has never worked a "real job" since.

The Skies Discrowned is solid, but it does show the marks of being a first novel and of being written in some haste. Here's Tim remembering the writing of that novel:

"I was real scared of the idea of a novel. I thought, 'This is sixty thousand words! That's a lot of words! You'd better start really slow.' So I wrote about ten thousand words of my characters just making lunch and talking and trying to get their cars started and doing nothing, having dinner, as I recall. And I brought this to [my friend and author, K.W.] Jeter and said, 'Look! I've got ten thousand words!' And he read it and said, 'Throw this in the trash. This is no good. You have to start where the action starts.' I thought, Okay, though that seems awfully profligate. I'll use up the action way too quick.
But I did throw away that ten thousand words, and started within a few minutes of when the action started, and sent the three chapters and outline to Laser Books, and they said, 'Well, do us a fourth chapter, 'cause we've never heard of you.' So I did a fourth chapter real quick, and then they said, 'Okay, you have a contract; go.'"

To my eyes, the novel reads like "Rafael Sabatini in space", but with more than a touch of Fritz Leiber's Gather, Darkness. None of that is surprising, since Powers is a fan of both authors, especially Leiber and his tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Laser Books folded rather quickly, but Tim Powers was determined to make it as a pro author. He wrote another swashbuckling novel, The Drawing of the Dark, and sold it to Del Rey Books. This how he describes the genesis of it all:

"Way back in '75, Roger Elwood [of Laser Books] tried to market a line of fantasy novels, a proposed series of about ten books, all based on the notion of King Arthur being reincarnated throughout history... (...) K.W. Jeter and Ray Nelson and I agreed to write them, and we got together and divvied up history. I wound up with three time-slots: Vienna in 1529—I had wanted the Siege of Malta, which was about fifty years later, but I think Nelson had one too close to that—and England in about 1750, and England in 1810. I had written the first two, and outlined the third, when Elwood told us the deal was off. The first was The Drawing of the Dark, and luckily I eventually sent it on to Del Rey Books, and Lester del Rey made me re-write it hard; the second one has never been published, and the rearranged scraps of it and the outlined third one became The Anubis Gates."

That whole "Vienna in 1529" thing refers to the cataclysmic Siege of Vienna, which had been immortalized previously by Robert E. Howard in "The Shadow of the Vulture". I personally think Powers' novel is partly an homage to REH. We know he is a Howard fan and we know he was reading REH as a teen--not that long before he wrote the novel. Hell, his mom was an O.G. fan of Two-Gun Bob from the days of Weird Tales. As Tim once put it:

"[My mom] read Weird Tales when she was a kid and when I started to get interested in all this, she would say, 'I remember H. P. Lovecraft, I remember Robert E. Howard!' "

Another reason I see The Drawing of the Dark as something of a Howardian homage is the protagonist. Brian Duffy is an aging Irish mercenary. He's no stranger to wine, wenching and bloody mayhem...and he's Gaelic Irish. REH-approved, right there.

Powers' novel is sword-and-sorcery, though a bit borderline. I'll put it this way: if Moorcock's The War Hound and the World's Pain is S&S, then so is The Drawing of the Dark.*

In my opinion, The Drawing of the Dark isn't Powers' strongest novel. I don't think the plot is quite as tight as it could be. Also, the myriad elements that Powers pulls together for this "secret history"--a genre that Tim would specialize in from then on--don't always ring true to me, since I'm fairly knowledgeable regarding most of them as well and I don't agree with a few of his choices. All that said, I did, without a doubt, find it entertaining and more than a few people I respect think very highly of it. Fletcher Vredenburgh is one of those people and you can read his excellent review here. For those wanting a contrasting view of The Drawing of the Dark, there is Woke bitchery such as this .

As mentioned in the Powers quote above, The Anubis Gates was the other novel he salvaged out of the "Arthur reincarnated" project. This is the book that put him on the map and was my first exposure to his work. It's a time travel novel set in 1810 and several years subsequent to that. It's also a "secret history" providing the "real" reasons for various odd and mysterious historical events. Powers' imagination was in overdrive for this one and his research was impeccable. I consider it his masterpiece. Check out this fine review here.

Despite being set in the early nineteenth century, there's quite a bit of swordplay and sorcery in The Anubis Gates, with a fine sword duel at the very end. It gets my highest recommendation.

Tim Powers' final swashbuckling novel--so far--is 1987's On Stranger Tides. The protagonist finds himself captured by Blackbeard and up to his neck in piracy, voodoo and other supernatural doings. And, yes, this was the novel that "inspired" Pirates of the Caribbean IV. While the movie bears precious little resemblance to the novel, Powers is philosophical and decidedly un-bitter about the situation.

James Gurney’s bad-ass cover for On Stranger Tides. — James Gurney’s bad-ass cover for *On Stranger Tides*.

A word about Powers protagonists might be apropos at this point. Many, if not most, authors tend to write protagonists based, at least loosely, upon themselves. The examples are endless. Tim's heroes are often fairly educated guys who find themselves in crazy situations. They then use their wits and varying amounts of physical courage to solve their problems. As has been noted elsewhere, Powersian heroes are also fond of a drink or two as well. Thus, the protagonists in the swashbuckling novels of Powers tend to fall more on the Clark Ashton Smith end of the S&S spectrum. Nothing wrong with that. We know that Tim is a Klarkash-Ton fan. His novel, The Stress of Her Regard, takes its title from a--fairly obscure--line of CASian verse.

However, everything discussed above does not exhaust Mr. Powers' connections to sword-and-sorcery and S&S-adjacent things. Far from it. Did you know that Tim had some poetry published in the legendary pages of Amra magazine when he was barely seventeen? He also had some of his artwork published in a 1973 issue of Amra. Meanwhile, in 1970, his poem, "Ode to Maldronah", was published in the third issue of W. Paul Ganley's esteemed Weirdbook. For those sadly ignorant of the fact, Maldronah was a fictional poet of Ur created by A. Merritt for The Ship of Ishtar. Almost thirty years later, Powers would write one of the best essays--so far--on The Ship of Ishtar for the Paizo edition of that classic heroic fantasy novel.

For those of you out there who say, "Yeah, Tim, but what have you done for S&S lately?", I can point to his great intro to Michael Shea's The Mines of Behemoth. He wrote another fine intro for Nightshade's The Door to Saturn. Unfortunately, that volume didn't contain any of Klarkash-Ton's S&S tales. Still, it's Klarkash-Ton and Tim was there to stand and deliver. Many others can't say the same. Finally, just last year, Powers wrote a bad-ass intro for Centipede Press' edition of Leiber's Swords in the Mist, which fulfilled a life-long dream.

Yeah, Tim Powers is one of us. By his own admission, he's fond of a glass of brew now n' then. Raise a toast in his honor on this, his birthday. You won't get another chance until 2024.

*Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn ranked The Drawing of the Dark as one of the hundred best fantasy novels of all time.