More Walls Broken by Tim Powers
There’s something charming about the well-written novella. And “More Walls Broken” is as charming, clever, and enjoyable a novella as they come.
I like the way a novella boils a tale down to a meal-sized portion, something that can be digested in a seating or two. No commitment to a three- or five- or ten-book series (I’m looking at you, Brandon Sanderson and James S. A. Corey), just a quick dalliance with a fun story that takes you away for a day, but not much more. It’s a summer fling, not a long-term relationship, but maybe it’s good enough to check out other books by the same author, maybe for something requiring more commitment.
“More Walls Broken” is everything to want in a novella, and it’s everything I love about Tim Powers. Defying genre classifications and falling somewhere between flipping tropes and refreshing them to feel entirely new, Powers mixes science, fantasy, religion, and mythology as if they are different sides of the same gem; each time he tosses it another facet is revealed. More Walls Broken mixes quantum physics, fantasy, horror, humor, and the stultifying world of university politics. Powers drops the reader in right in the middle of the story, going beyond cutting to the chase to cut halfway through the chase itself. He dangles crumbs along the way, leaving just enough clues to tantalize and keep you flipping pages. And yet, once you reach the last page, each detail has been exactly what was necessary for a twist that is satisfying and sufficient for a novella-sized story.
I loved it. “More Walls Broken” is everything that I love about Tim Powers and his spellbinding ability to pull back the curtain on a completely ordinary world to find hidden magic in the science behind it.
More Walls Broken
Science fiction
Subterranean
February 28, 2019
Hardcover
136
As this ingenious new novella, More Walls Broken, begins, a trio of academics have just entered a deserted California cemetery late at night, bringing with them a number of arcane devices aimed at achieving an equally arcane purpose. What follows is the sort of dizzying, mind-expanding entertainment that only the always reliable, always astonishing Tim Powers could have written. These three men, professors in the “Consciousness Research” department at Cal Tech University, have come together to perform a seemingly impossible task. Their goal: to open a door between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and to capture the ghost of the recently deceased scientist Armand Vitrielli. For their own desperate reasons, they hope to avail themselves of the secrets Vitrielli left behind at the time of his death. Their experiment, naturally, fails to come off exactly as planned. A door between the worlds does, in fact, open, letting in something—someone—completely unexpected, and setting in motion a chain of events that will reverberate throughout the narrative. Intricate, intelligent, and always thoroughly absorbing, More Walls Broken mixes fantasy and quantum physics in utterly unique fashion.
About Daniel