Alternate Routes
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A New Novel From Award-Winning Master of Fantasy and Science Fiction Tim Powers. A modern ghost story as only Tim Powers can write it. Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways—phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway—and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade. Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to—and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out. Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them. About Alternate Routes: “Powers continues his run of smashing expectations and then playing with the pieces in this entertaining urban fantasy. . . . this calculated, frenetic novel ends with hope for redemption born from chaos. Powers’ work is recommended for urban fantasy fans who enjoy more than a dash of the bizarre.”—Publishers Weekly About Tim Powers: "Powers writes in a clean, elegant style that illuminates without slowing down the tale. . . . [He] promises marvels and horrors, and delivers them all."—Orson Scott Card "Other writers tell tales of magic in the twentieth century, but no one does it like Powers."—The Orlando Sentinel ". . . immensely clever stuff.... Powers' prose is often vivid and arresting . . . All in all, Powers' unique voice in science fiction continues to grow stronger.”—Washington Post Book World “Powers is at heart a storyteller, and ruthlessly shapes his material into narrative form.”—The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction “On Stranger Tides . . . immediately hooks you and drags you along in sympathy with one central character's appalling misfortunes on the Spanish Main, [and] escalates from there to closing mega-thrills so determinedly spiced that your palate is left almost jaded."—David Langford "On Stranger Tides . . . was the inspiration for Monkey Island. If you read this book you can really see where Guybrush and LeChuck were -plagiarized- derived from, plus the heavy influence of voodoo in the game. . . . [the book] had a lot of what made fantasy interesting . . .”—legendary game designer Ron Gilbert “Powers's strengths [are] his originality, his action-crammed plots, and his ventures into the mysterious, dark, and supernatural.” Los Angeles Times Book Review "[Powers’ work delivers] an intense and intimate sense of period or realization of milieu; taut plotting, with human development and destiny . . . and, looming above all, an awareness of history itself as a merciless turning of supernatural wheels. . . . Powers' descriptions . . . are breathtaking, sublimely precise . . . his status as one of fantasy's major stylists can no longer be in doubt.”—SF Site "Powers creates a mystical, magical otherworld superimposed on our own and takes us on a marvelous, guided tour of his vision."—Science Fiction Chronicle "The fantasy novels of Tim Powers are nothing if not ambitious . . . Meticulously researched and intellectually adventurous, his novels rarely fail to be strange and wholly original."—San Francisco Chronicle **
Featured Series
1 primary bookVickery and Castine is a 1-book series first released in 2018 with contributions by Tim Powers.
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Alternate Routes (Vickery and Castine 1) by Tim Powers
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This book is archetypal Tim Powers' fare. The book sets a fantasy within an urban, hyper-modern setting. In this case, the setting is the freeways of Los Angeles. You probably did not know that when a being possessed of a will goes past another being with a will, a force is generated much like electricity is generated when a magnet is spun around a wire or vice versa. The force permits some short-term vision into the past or future. This effect is normally not large, so you need locations where there are a lot of moving “beings with wills” going past stationary “beings with wills.”
Like freeways, for example,
You also were probably unaware that the ramifications of this field is to expand possibilities such that at the margins of these fields, or, say, close to freeways, it is easy to reach out into other possibilities to talk with beings who think they are the same people as people who have died in this world.
Likewise, you probably didn't know that there was an obscure government agency, known as the Transportation Utility Agency (the “TUA”) whose job is to interview ghosts - or “deleted persons” - in order to get intelligence on otherwise unknown things for the government.
All this is true in Tim Powers' world.
Sebastian Vickery was a Secret Service agent who stumbled onto these truths while on the job. When the TUA tried to kill him, he shot first and is now an outlaw surving on the margins among those who have turned the “current” into profit. His existence is up-ended when a TUA agent from his past - Ingrid Castine - warns him that the TUA have a lock on him through the ghost of his dead wife and are about to terminate him with extreme prejudice.
From that point on, we have slambang action on the highways of Los Angeles and intrigue among both the marginal grifters who work with the “current” and the TUA bureaucracy. The action is fun and exciting, but, for me, the real charm was in seeing the marginal world that Powers creates and the rules he imagines for those trafficking in ghosts.
But, of course, being Tim Powers, the story could not be told without extra helpings of obscure mythology. This time we get Daedulus, the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur. Interestingly, Powers, who is a Catholic, put a number of gratuitous Catholic references in the story. Thus Vickery goes to Latin Mass. There was an abacus that became a rosary. I am not sure what that was all about, except it probably was another layer of symbolism for literary critics to unravel.
Honestly, I enjoyed the portions of the story set in our world. I live imagining that there is a deeper world just behind our own. When the story shifted to the other world, it lost me. The other reality was not very interesting. Likewise, the ending set in the fantasy world of myth was hackneyed and silly compared to the real-world struggle. I certainly understand that Powers is fascinated by Jungian archetypes, but the shift from freeways to minotaurs interrupted my willing suspension of disbelief as a reader.
That said, I am going to read the next volume in the series because I did enjoy this one.
