The Anubis Gates

By Tim Powers

Powers only seems to have one basic concept; that magic was once real and existed in the world of men as a form of great power, but with time, it faded and was replaced by reason, or religion, and today it has all but disapeared. Setting his novels at various interesting points of history, Powers weaves tales around various famous historical characters, casting them as crypto-magicians making use of the dying arcane arts and telling stories which put a whole new spin on events which unfolded with drab conformity in the history books.

Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. This was the third Powers novel I've read (and I've just realised that there is no blog post for the second, so see below) and in this case, it worked. The story is about soft bellied academic Brendan Doyle who is hired by an excentric billionaire to travel back throught time and visit Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but where he falls afoul of a group of magicians and ancient Egyptian 'clones' and finds himself left behind. Its a nice set up and it leads a good story. It doesn't quite have the ambience and feel of 'Declare', but its much better than 'On Stranger Tides'.
4/5

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On Stranger Tides

By Tim Powers

Its been a while since I read this book which I bought when I heard it would be the story upon which the latest 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie, not because I cared about the film, but because it was intolerable that there was a famous pirate novel which I'd not only not read, but never even heard of before. This was also the inspiration for the 'Monkey Island' puzzle games, which I've only ever seen the first way, but which I enjoyed immensely at the time.

This was the second Powers novel I'd read, and it was something of an anticlimax after 'Declare', not least because I had assumed that since the premise was similar (all Powers novels appear to be about the fading of magic in the world of men, in one way or another). On the whole I really didn't care much for this story. 
2/5

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The Drawing of the Dark

By Tim Powers

Another Powers novel which deals with an Irish protagonist in a world of fading magic. Brian Duffy is a Condottieri who has served long and hard in multiple campaigns. One day in Venice a strange man offers him a job as a bouncer at a public house in Vienna. Little does Duffy know that this man is actually an infamous wizard and his offer will catapult him in to an arcane world of mythology and folklore whose outcome will speel doom or prosperity for the western powers against the east. Set in 1529, during Suleiman the Magnificient's seige of Vienna, this story tells an alternative version of how that battle was really won (with the help of Magick, Excalibur and a few geriatric Vikings).

As stories go, its okay. We're more in the vein of 'On Stranger Tides' than 'Declare', but the writing isn't quite as muddled and the simpler plot allows the reader to keep up with those more irrellevent details that sometimes are the fabric with which a good novel is woven.
3/5

Artist of the Month; Michael Whelan

One of the great sci fi and fantasy illustrators of the last decades has been Michael Whelan whose range and quality are so great as to inspire awe and respect from even the most deadened critics of the genre. For my part, I kept noticing Whelan's work, on various book covers and was amazed when I realised they were all the work of the same person. Whelan is nothing short of a genius, but its not for his sci fi and fantasy work that I bestow this opinion but rather for his more surreal paintings. Some of those that have caught my eye are included here. In recent years Whelan has put aside illustration and concentrated on fine art, and his paintings have the look of dreams illustrated. In many ways, his work reminds me of a Danish fine artist called Otto Frello except in as much as Frello's dreams appear to have been darker. Whelan's vision conjures up more of a sense of wonder and mystery.

Hack & Slay

I love this track. It evokes a perfect sense of exotic mystery, whilst making me want to pull out a sword and start slaughtering bejewelled snake cultists.

Artist of the Month: Rodney Matthews

Rodney Matthews was probably my first great love affair with illustration. Up until I bought his book 'In search of Forever', I'd not really concentrated my attentions on the style of one artist in particular. That changed when I brought home 'In search of Forever' and found that although there were many things I didn't care for in Mathews work, it was his execution that appealled to me. Looking back over it now I can see that most of Mathews work in the book is fairly unsophisticated, and usually a painted foreground is presented against an airbrushed background. Unsophisticated doesn't mean untalented in this regard, I'm refering to Matthews ability to create highly detailed images with the minimum of effort.


In todays digital world, making an image like the above isn't all that difficult, and those backgrounds almost seem rather quaint, but you have to consider how much attention and care real airbrush takes as opposed to airbrushing in photoshop. When you use an airbrush you have to physically mask the rest of the picture with film which you cut to shape with a scalpel. Scalpels are of course very sharp, so cut to deep and you scar the painting, cut too shallow and the film doesn't seperate well. When using an airbrush, you paint on something called Illustration board which is a thick, hardened paper that can withstand cutting and also absorb more liquid than ordinary paper without warping, though naturally there is a limited as I've discovered many times, much to my annoyance. A complicated airbrush might take several hours to prepare and then the airbrush itself has to be kept clean and in perfect working order because all it takes is one hiccup during spraying and the painting has a big fat splat mark in the centre.


Rodney Matthews painted (then, I don't know about now) using a mixture of media; inks for the backgrounds and large surface area's then inks and guache for the details. Quite how he got this combination to work was always a mystery to me, not least because guache dries with a very matt surface texture where as inks have a more crystallic/satin look about them. The thing thats always puzzled me is how Mathews, using guache brushwork manages to create such soft transitions into black shadows. Even today it puzzles me how he does this.


Matthews himself is about the same age as my Dad which always struck me as odd as I'd imagined any one in that generation must be devoid of imagination. He's also an ardent Christian which I also found at odds with his art (and in later years I've read that he has distanced himself from some of his earlier work) some of which seemed to contradict my, admittedly biased view of Christians. The fact that my big idol was the same age as my father and held views I couldn't empathise with only served to impress upon me the strange nature of imagination. I didn't actually like Matthews line all that much, far too much unrealistic armour for my liking, but I learned a lot from his pictures, copying them so late at night that I often didn't sleep at all.