Industry Insights: From The Industry Side

An Interview with Tim Powers

by Gareth-Michael Skarka
January 18, 2002

We just were granted second publication rights on this, by Gareth, who incidently is the second most prolific columnist at RPGnet over the past five years!

This interview originally ran in "THE RELEVANT CONUNDRUM" at the Gaming Outpost, and we appreciate Gaming Outpost and Gareth-Michael Skarka for allowing us to republish it!

From the secret magical history of Las Vegas in The Last Call, time travel in 17th century England in The Anubis Gates, or his latest work mixing Middle Eastern legend and the Cold War in DECLARE, Tim Powers' works have provided inspiration for gamers everywhere. His novels are found on many gamer's shelves, making him, along with such luminaries as Tolkien and Lovecraft, one of the benchmarks of reference for our community. This past summer, he was kind enough to consent to an interview.

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GMS: How do you go about choosing a subject for your novels: do you concentrate on subjects that are rife with odd coincidence and symbolism, or do you choose your subject and then scour it for those elements? I suspect that some of the elements are created whole-cloth, but I remember reading an interview where you said that often you just provide interpretation to actual historical fact...could you give an insight into your process?

Powers: What generally happens is that I'll read some non-fiction book or article and something in it will kind of make me raise an eyebrow. I read that Shelley's death-by-drowning was almost deliberate, with him sailing off into a gathering storm while everybody was hollering at him to turn around, and then his body was found washed up on the beach with all the flesh eaten away from his face and hands and a copy of Keats's poems in his pocket, folded open to "Lamia" -- well, pretty clearly it wouldn't be hard to find a supernatural story behind that! And luckily when I got into the details of Shelley and Byron and Keats, I found lots of suggestive stuff -- Keats having been born on Halloween, and so forth.

So I guess what I do is find a situation -- characters and setting and concerns -- that looks as if it would provide the raw materials for a story, and I write an outline and sell that to an editor; then I actually do the research, hoping that the situation really will support a story when considered at microscopic scale; fortunately, if you research anything with paranoid suspicion and a sharp eye for secret motives, I think you can find a secret supernatural story behind anything!

With enough research I'm sure you could write a Powers book based on Disneyland -- what had the land been used for previously, what's up with the buildings that have a Western-frontier north face and a Tomorrowland south face, what goes on at night after they're closed, what's with these tunnels, etc.

Often it's the most routine details that I find that lead to the most valuable conclusions. I bet a lot less is made up of whole cloth than you think!

GMS: Your work, with its injection of the fantastic into mundane historical or modern settings, has a large following among the RPG crowd. Have you ever done any gaming?

Powers: No, I've never done any gaming! Of course I know lots of people involved in it (is MUD a category of games?), and I love Kenneth Hite's books -- I know they're for gamers, but they seem to have been written for me. I guess I'm afraid that if I got into gaming it would totally absorb me, and I'd get no writing at all done.

GMS: Given it's literary roots, and the preparation and research involved, a large percentage of RPG gamers are aspiring writers. What advice do you have for beginners?

Powers: Oh gee -- lemme think. I'd say, Trust a game to give you character development and unexpected ways of working things out, but don't trust a game to give you a plot; anymore than you'd trust real life to give you a plot. Read lots of stuff, fiction and non-fiction, and read the good stuff twice -- once for enjoyment, then once more to see how the author got the effects. Keep in mind you owe the reader everything and the reader owes you nothing -- if someone doesn't "get" your story, it's your fault, not theirs.

At the same time, write about stuff you find fascinating, not what you imagine the reader will find fascinating; if you're lucky, they and you overlap. Don't listen to any writing advice that involves the phrase "Catch 22" -- it's invariably a lie.

GMS: What is your favorite among your own works, and why?

Powers: Huh! That's hard to say. I'm fond of each of 'em, even the two I wrote when I was twenty-three. I guess maybe I'd say Last Call-- because Las Vegas and the desert and Hoover Dam were such fine locales to write about, and it was the first time my wife and I had had the chance to actually go look at my settings, rather than me getting all the details from travel and picture books; and the Tarot magic, interwoven with Poker, was lots of fun to play with, and the Fisher King stuff fit into that so perfectly that sometimes I thought I was discovering it, not making it up; and the characters were all particularly fun -- Bugsy Siegel was great to study in my paranoid-polarized way.

GMS: You've written about the magical history of Las Vegas, Byron and Shelley, 17-century England, 16th century Viennese Brewmeisters, The Cold War, the Golden Age of Piracy...are there any historical eras that you haven't covered yet which attract you, or that you consider ripe for "wierdification?'

Powers: I've thought of doing one on the Old West; I think there's room there. And it would be fun to deal with Lovecraft in 1920s New York. And I've wondered why Evariste Galois, the 18th-century French mathematician, really died in a duel. Really, though, I don't get rolling until I stumble across some evocative reference, and usually it indicates something I wouldn't have gone to otherwise.

GMS: What's next for you? Anything currently in the works?

Powers: This next one -- well, I don't want to get very specific! But it'll take place roughly now, I think, with repercussions of some odd stuff that was going on in the L.A. movie industry in the 20s & 30s; and the desert will figure. I think that pretty well sums it up!

GMS: Thank you for your time, Tim.