Tim Powers Information

Author
Muscoy, CA

Biography:
Tim Powers has been writing science fiction since the early 1970s. While born in Buffalo, New York in 1952, he's lived in Southern California for the last fifty years and has been married to Serena for over thirty years. From On Stranger Tides to The Anubis Gates to The Drawing of the Dark, Tim has created fascinating histories of what might have been. He has been a frequent attendee and speaker at many science fiction conventions.

Tim has used his lifelong love of history to imbue his fiction with a strong sense of time, place and the fantastic. Along with his old friends James Blaylock and K. W. Jeter, he helped develop the notion of steampunk (think Jules Verne and H. G. Wells on steroids). As reviewer and ardent history buff Jim Mann has observed:

Powers has the remarkable ability to look at disparate parts of real history, examine them for where things are not quite explained or are just about strange, and weave a compelling "secret history" of what was really going on. It's impressive not only in that he does it in a way which seems consistent with the real history we know, but in a way in which while we read, we accept the supernatural underpinnings he creates. Moreover, science fiction and fantasy fans are prone to talk of sense of wonder and the feeling it invokes: Powers manages to take often rather mundane history ... and overlay it with remarkable moments of sense of wonder.

Tim Powers graduated from California State University at Fullerton with a B.A. in English in 1976; the same year saw the publication of his first two novels, The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust (both from Laser Books).

Tim's subsequent novels are The Drawing of the Dark (Del Rey, 1979), The Anubis Gates (Ace, 1983, winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo), Dinner at Deviant's Palace (Ace, 1985, winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award), On Stranger Tides (Ace, 1987), The Stress of Her Regard (Ace, 1989, winner of the Mythopoeic Award), Last Call (Morrow, 1992, winner of the World Fantasy Award), Expiration Date (Tor, 1996), Earthquake Weather (Tor, 1997), Declare (Morrow, 2001, winner of the World Fantasy Award), and Three Days to Never (Morrow, 2006). He is also the author of a collection of short stories, Strange Itineraries (Tachyon, 2005).

Tim Powers has taught at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University six times, and has for many years co-taught the Writers of the Future Workshop.