More Walls Broken
by Tim Powers
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Pub Date Feb 28 2019 | Archive Date Mar 01 2019
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Description
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. The result is a brilliantly imagined account of multiple realities and unintended consequences that is pure dazzle, pure storytelling, pure—and unmistakable—Tim Powers. In book after book, story after story, Powers has set the standard for literate imaginative fiction. With this essential, beautifully realized novella, he has done it once again.
Advance Praise
Publishers Weekly:
“Three professors fumble their way through opening gates to increasing disaster in Powers’s enjoyable novella… He likewise weaves in dark humor amid the professors’ nerve-racking attempts to fix the ‘walls’ between realities. If the tropes inherent in crossing parallel dimensions are overly familiar, Powers (Alternate Routes) puts his own small twists on them, keeping readers guessing about how he’s going to clean up the mess—though some messes may not be cleanable.”
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781596068865 |
| PRICE | $25.00 (USD) |
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Featured Reviews
Lou J, Media/Journalist
More Walls Broken by Tim Powers
More Walls Broken
by Tim Powers
M 50x66
Lou Jacobs's review Dec 19, 2018 · edit
it was amazing
Enter a world where it's perfectly acceptable to have adjacent worlds of alternate time lines. The setting ... 3 professors .... 2 old and irascible and bumbling and 1 younger and adept ... are at the gravesite of Armand Vitrielli in a chilly moonlit cemetery ... ready to embark on a scientific enterprise utilizing Vitrielli's device - the "slide-rule" - to cleave reality. And, hopefully allow Vitrielli's ghost to materialize allowing his capture and interrogation. Clive Cobb, the younger professor from California State University's Consciousness Research Department , is knowledgeable on using Professor Vitrielli's device ... But, instead of conjuring up the Professor, his daughter unceremoniously plops out of thin air onto the gravesite in an unconscious state .... and all are perplexed.
The keystone cops of a group flee the cemetery with "daughter" in tow .. only to miss another entity coalesce at the grave. Has Vitrielli's soul been transmigrated across the time continuum?
This sets up Powers' complicated plot regarding possible alternate realities and serious consequences with interference. Powers with aplomb makes the situation entirely believable and riddles the landscape with comic happenstance in an effort for Cobb to set things right.
Thanks to Netgalley and #Subterranean Press for providing an Uncorrected Ebook proof of this delightful tale in exchange for an honest review!!
Cindy M, Reviewer
How is it possible that Mr. Powers just keeps getting better and better? How does he continue to reach new heights in mystery / horror when I think each new book just can't be topped? This offering is one of the best TP I've read, with (yet another) unique premise and evocative style. If you've already read Mr. Powers' works, then you know why I use the superlatives that I do; if you haven't read him yet, you need to. As always, highly recommended!
Mallory Anne-Marie H, Reviewer
In every single story by this illustrious and utterly imaginative author is contained a core that is magical. Mr. Powers surpasses telekinesis and "Scotty's" "Beam me up" transporter from Star Trek. If there is anyone who can "magically" (or "quantumly") effect travel through dimensions, that person is this author. There is no need for suspension of disbelief. Belief is intrinsic. There is no need to parse the reader's feelings for the character; we know intrinsically who is good and who is not, and we line up with them accordingly. Tim Powers possesses an illimitable imagination, and for the duration of reading his work, so do we. The wonderful aspect is that this expansion of imagination does not end when we close the book: it lasts forever, and we are different individuals after than when we came in.
I only wish that MORE WALLS BROKEN had been a novel, not a novella; it has a terrifically cliffhanging ending, and this inquiring mind needs to know: "What happened? And in which world? Are the "good characters" all right, in the end? Did the "bad guys" get their just desserts?"
To the final question, I already know the answer.
"Can I believe?"
"Yes, I can."
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