Los Angeles is full of ghosts - real ghosts and solid ghosts, ghost hunters and ghost junkies - chasing and being chased in a mad quest for immortality. As a series of disasters strikes the city, the lives of three innocent people converge in a wild escapade through a landscape haunted by the dead, the mad and the just plain strange.
Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare.
Most of Powers's novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.
Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959.
He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton.
Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him.
Powers's first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages.
Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop.
He also taught part time at the University of Redlands.
Volumen ómnibus que, pese a su título, no incluye la trilogía Fault Lines entera, sino solo Expiration Date y Earthquake Weather, segunda y tercera parte de la misma, siendo Última ronda la primera y única traducida al castellano por ahora.
Expiration Date es una historia aparte de Última Ronda; por su parte, Earthquake Weather es el pegamento que une las historias de las dos novelas anteriores. Heredando los elementos de la primera novela (el Rey Pescador, el Tarot, etc.) y añadiendo componentes de fantasmas dickensianos, dioses de la mitología griega y las manos de Houdini, el autor desarrolla una historia independiente en el segundo libro, que se unirá a la del primero en la tercera novela, un largo relato coral (con más personas diferentes que cuerpos dispuestos a albergarlas) unido espiritualmente al de Esencia oscura, cuya principal característica es la imposibilidad de seguirlo si no se hace un cuadrante de personajes, escenarios y situaciones que ubiquen la acción en cada momento. Powers es un titán y se piensa que somos todos como él.
Me ha llevado tiempo. A ratos se ha hecho cuesta arriba. Finalmente, ha merecido la pena. Hay muchas voces en la literatura fantástica de actualidad, pero Powers es de las mejores.