I’ve been limping toward a post on Tim Powers’s monsters for a while, but I always have one more book to read before I can do the topic justice.

I’ve been limping toward a post on Tim Powers’s monsters for a while, but I always have one more book to read before I can do the topic justice.

Is anyone else on this trek with me? Does anyone even know what I’m talking about? Kenneth Hite?

So now I’m finishing up Medusa’s Web and it turns out… it’s not quite the same monster as in Declare and/or Stress of Her Regard but it’s right in the same constellation of ideas. So close, in fact, that these all might be the same monster refracted through different observers.

And of course much of the time it doesn’t really behave like a monster at all, more like just a set of routines that people can’t leave well enough alone.

Features:
1. looks like a mundane thing – rocks, squiggles, whirlwinds/cloudy gusts
2. behaves like a wave form – can be destructively interfered-with, subjected to double slit experiments, reflected/refracted into prisons etc.
3. kind of intelligent and motivated but mostly on the level of “I eat you now” or “we remove threat.”
4. impossibly ancient/eternal.
5. possessed of or manifested through “spin” – more literally than quarks, less literally than actual whirlwinds.
6. capable of bestowing great gifts on humans but only to their destruction, because the kinds of people who want the gifts and are willing to pay the price are uniformly assholes.
7. kinda vampiric, or psychic-vampiric, or full-on blatantly vampiric.

So far the only books I’ve found that don’t participate at all in this pattern are the first Powers books I ever read: Anubis Gates and Drawing of the Dark.

We talk to Rasputina

further information.

Golden apples: recipes & myth is one of the best article teasers ever.

Reading Ulan Dhor, in which our pseudo-medievalish hero goes to an ancient city, wakes up a sleeping ultratech “mage” and starts a genocidal civil war.

Reading Ulan Dhor, in which our pseudo-medievalish hero goes to an ancient city, wakes up the sleeping ultratech “mage” Rogol Domedonfors and starts a genocidal civil war.

So damn LotFP.
Also so replete with “applicability” and satirical spirit that I suspect it’s a roman a clef – which would let it off the hook of being kinda a big pile of incidents with only the slenderest connecting thread (I’m waiting to get to the end of the collection before passing judgment on that).

Is Rogol Domedonfors in fact Robert Moses? He’s a classic Oz wizard who prefers his own architecture to the people who are supposed to live in it.

The Voynich manuscript has been digitized by the Beinecke library, and this allowed me… to take a patchwork pencil tracing of the entire sequence of nine spheres.”

The Voynich manuscript, “the most mysterious manuscript in the world,” which appeared to be written in some language that wasn’t any known language, has finally been decoded. It’s a reference book for health remedies for women in the medieval period written in Latin but an unusual script. “The foldout diagram of nine illustrated spheres found in the Voynich manuscript proved the key to understanding it. The Voynich manuscript has been digitized by the Beinecke library, and this allowed me, at maximum magnification, to take a patchwork pencil tracing of the entire sequence of nine spheres.”

“Medieval lettering is notoriously fickle: individual letter variations, styles and combinations are confusing at the best of times. I recognized at least two of the characters in the Voynich manuscript text as Latin ligatures, Eius and Etiam. Ligatures were developed as scriptorial short-cuts. They are composed of selected letters of a word, which together represent the whole word, not unlike like a monogram. … It became obvious that each character in the Voynich manuscript represented an abbreviated word and not a letter.”

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/voynich-manuscript-solution/

I should really start an “I check for traps” collection.

I should really start an “I check for traps” collection.