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Earthquake Weather

Tekijä: Tim Powers

Muut tekijät: Katso muut tekijät -osio.

Sarjat: The Fisher King trilogy (3)

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioMaininnat
8251426,234 (3.65)25
A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life. But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son, Koot Hoomie. Kootie is destined to be the next Fisher king, but he is only thirteen years old--too young, his mother thinks, to perform the rituals to assume the Kingship. But not too young, perhaps, to assist in reuniting Scott Crane's body and spirit, and restoring him to life.… (lisätietoja)
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Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 14) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
This is a sequel to two other books by Tim Powers, one Last Call and another Expiration Date. I liked Last Call a lot. Expiration Date was also pretty good but I enjoyed it less. This book was a combination of the two with characters from both and a fusion of the various supernatural rules from both. The end result was that there was too much of everything. Too many characters, too many supernatural elements. One of the things I like about some of Tim Powers books is that the supernatural slowly leaks in to a realistic world. This book starts out swimming in the supernatural and it only gets deeper. In addition, most of the story is told from the point of view of some new characters that I find unapealing. ( )
  mgplavin | Oct 3, 2021 |
EARTHQUAKE WEATHER was, unfortunately a bit of a slog to get through. Powers mashed together the worlds and characters of LAST CALL and EXPIRATION DATE, but although, like all Powers books, it had its moments, there were just too many characters that I didn't care about, and too much time spent with them all bickering while sitting around in a variety of rooms or vehicles. You know that long bit of the AVENGERS movie where they all act like spoiled kids? It's a bit like that, but goes on for longer.

The Fisher King mythology took too much of a back seat to the ghost plot devices for me in this one, and, like EXPIRATION DATE, I felt it suffered because of it. Personally I'd have liked more focus on the Tarot and archetypes to take center stage instead of the bickering characters and multiple real, and ghostly, personalities.

But again, like EXPIRATION DATE, a sub par Powers is still better than most everything else. It's just that my expectations had been set too high after the brilliance of LAST CALL. ( )
1 ääni williemeikle | Dec 22, 2018 |
Earthquake Weather is Tim Powers' third book in the Fault Lines trilogy. Powers wraps up all the weirdness of the first two into something even stranger than either. In much the same way Last Call and Expiration Date were about the Fisher King and the sad not-quite-life of ghosts, Earthquake Weather is about a desperate quest to appease Dionysus, god of wine and death.

Also, much like Last Call and Expiration Date, this is also a novel about mental illness, and the indignities and injustice of our attempts to treat the most serious cases, in the mold of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Janis Cordelia Plumtree, sufferer of multiple personality disorder, and unwilling ward of the state of California, personifies the mostly invisible struggles of everyone whose mind is broken in some serious way.

Multiple personality disorder is no longer considered a serious diagnosis, a fact noted by Angelica Sullivan in the book, but with magical means Powers is able to make it more real than the real world. Plumtree doesn't just have different personalities, she has different people inhabiting her body on a daily basis. Janis tries to keep a bottle of mouthwash handy, because she finds it disturbing that someone else's spit is in her mouth. In this case, that is a totally reasonable thing to do, and the oddly specific nature of this complaint makes me wonder if Powers stumbled on this example in his research for the book.

Janis and the exceptionally ill-fated Sid Cochran meet up with all of the characters from Last Call and Expiration Date to complete the quest for Dionysus. What follows is typical Powers, and I won't explore the plot here, because I think the grand concept of the whole trilogy is more interesting, and also more subtle. The first time I read this book, I found it both strangely disturbing, and a little ho-hum. As Powers' books go, the plot doesn't seem as tightly wound, and the large ensemble cast from the previous two books can be hard to keep track of. That explains the ho-hum feeling.

It is the disturbing part that I only recently figured out. I find the quest to win the favor of the god Dionysus horrifying, because the boons he offers seem to be worse than enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. For example, the pagadebiti, Dionysus' wine of forgiveness and a central feature of both the backstory and the quest, exacts a steep price: you must surrender to Dionysus every memory and emotion you have regarding he person involved. For Sid Cochran, his role in the quest is to offer up his beloved and freshly dead wife Nina [who it turns out was really married to Dionysus using Sid as a proxy] and their unborn child to Dionysus as a peace offering or gesture of goodwill.

This strikes me as very odd, but I didn't realize why until the third time through the book. The key bit in that realization was a story told about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. St. Margaret started having visions of Christ. In a prudent move, he approached her confessor and told him about them. The confessor, a stolid sort who knew that most reports of visions were just fantasies or hallucinations, asked her to query Christ in her visions and report back to him. St. Margaret dutifully did so, and the confessor was surprised to find his questions had been answered accurately. At this point, he got suspicious, since Catholics take Satanic temptation seriously. He asked St. Margaret to ask Christ what sins he had confessed last week.

St. Margaret reported back: "He told me he did not know. He said he had forgotten." The priest was dumbfounded by this, because he had expected to have his sins thrown back in his face. What he got instead, was mercy. The sacrament of reconciliation, popularly known as confession, only asks for honesty and penitence. The only forgetting that happens is apparently on God's part, as mysterious as that sounds. I used to think that it was a burden to remember all the sins you have been forgiven, but Powers showed me that it is not.

What I think Powers has done with Earthquake Weather is to write a negative theodicy. A complaint often advanced against theism in general, and Christianity in particular, is that a just god could not allow for so much unjust suffering in the world. If God were truly good, and truly all powerful, then it would be simple to alleviate the cries of the poor, for example.

Using myth, Powers has written for us the world that would result from the attentions of a god that is good, after a fashion, but willing to force his intentions onto people to guarantee results. By the end of Earthquake Weather, nearly every character has been found to be the pawn of Dionysus in some fashion. Even Sherman Oaks, the villain of Expiration Date, is in his service. I also realized that Dionysus is so terrible because he is so just. Everyone gets what they deserve. Precisely.

If you've lived in Christendom your whole life, you probably don't expect this. Neil Gaiman's books helped me realize that people playing at paganism in the United States and Europe are almost always just lapsed Christians. These, and the internet atheists, are the quarters from which complaints about God's goodness usually come. As Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man, they haven't actually managed to get far enough away from Christianity to judge it accurately.

In his way, I think Powers is trying to help. ( )
  bespen | Jul 5, 2017 |
Not as good as the previous two in the trilogy, but not bad. In this one, Powers tried to pull #1 and #2 together, but for me it didn't quite work. There were too many characters, and their voices weren't distinct enough from each other. Also, and this is just me, I don't find wine, its flavor, history, agriculture, as magical and fascinating as some people do, Powers among them. Cards, from their tarot forebears to contemporary games of chance and risk were the "them," so to speak, of the first one, so Powers's use of them in "Last Call" really got my interest. I'll definitely be reading more of his work. ( )
  NatalieSW | Nov 23, 2016 |
I read the first book of the Faultline trilogy, Last Call, some years ago and recall having quite enjoyed its novel take on fusing mythology and magic with mundane history, intertwining the legends of the Arthurian Fisher King and the archetypes of the Tarot cards with the history of Las Vegas and its gambling. The cast of characters was weird, the history was arcane, the action was packed and I was loving it. The second, Expiration Date, introduced the secret world of ghosts and those who “smoke” them on the mean streets of LA and began to be a little bogged down with all of the cool details. Finally, I just read the last of the series, Earthquake Weather, which brought together the themes and characters from the first two and all their cool ideas, and just began a bit too unwieldy in the culmination.

Here, Scott Crane, the hapless everyman of Last Call who found himself set up for the role of the King of the West, has been murdered in Southern California, his kingship up for grabs. Formerly ghost-possessed teen Koot Hoomie Parganas and his adoptive parents from Expiration Date, may be set up to take up the mantle, but do they want it? Finally, Plumtree, the woman who houses the disembodied spirit who killed Crane, and “Scant” Corcoran, another hapless everyman, having escaped from a murderous, ghost-haunted psychiatrist, find that they might need the aid of the god Dionysus himself and his fabled wine to put to right Crane’s death and save themselves. Trying to tie together the battle for the archetypical “kingship of the West,” all of Expiration Date’s ghost lore, and the wine based mythology of Dionysus might have been a bit too much, especially when we have to fill in some characters who need to be filled in on existence of all this supernatural stuff.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to enjoy- as in the previous books, much interesting tidbits and weird coincidences of historical figures are explained in a magical light- from Bugsy Siegel to Thomas Edison to Mary Ellen Pleasant, from the Queen Mary to the Winchester Mystery House, and it can be difficult to separate out the real from the extrapolated. However, here, I felt that there was just too much packed in, just too many threads and elements that bogged down the action and pace this time around. There was quite a bit of egregious info dumping, sometimes not even masked under long, detailed conversations among the large stable of characters. Occasionally, paragraphs were set aside for simply filling us in in the long backstory of various minor characters and how all the threads fit together, which, however interesting they were, dragged the pace of the story to a crawl. Also, I was less enamored of the role of destiny and fate this time around, which made the proceedings feel a bit preordained.

In the end, Earthquake Weather does an okay job at pulling all of the threads from the previous two novels into a tangled but complete ending in which most, if not all, come to a complete resolution. The feeling of the unavoidable destiny and the pages of exposition, though, really tangled up the reader here, I felt, and I would not recommend this one unless you really loved both previous books and really need to know what happens, or are super into Greek and Arthurian mythology in the modern world. ( )
  Spoonbridge | Apr 26, 2016 |
Näyttää 1-5 (yhteensä 14) (seuraava | näytä kaikki)
ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu

» Lisää muita tekijöitä (1 mahdollinen)

Tekijän nimiRooliTekijän tyyppiKoskeeko teosta?Tila
Powers, Timensisijainen tekijäkaikki painoksetvahvistettu
Campion, PaulKansikuvataiteilijamuu tekijäeräät painoksetvahvistettu
Koelsch, MichaelKansikuvataiteilijamuu tekijäeräät painoksetvahvistettu
Potter, J. K.Kansikuvataiteilijamuu tekijäeräät painoksetvahvistettu

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Teoksen kanoninen nimi
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Tärkeät tapahtumat
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Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the table of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader, set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.
- William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father, and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts;
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world...
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented...
- William Shakespeare, Richard II
So long as you do not die and rise again,
You are a stranger to the dark earth.
- Goethe
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For Serena
again, and still, and always
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
A pay telephone was ringing in the corridor by the restrooms, but the young woman who had started to get up out of the padded orange-vinyl booth just blinked around in evident puzzlement and sat down again, tugging her denim jacket more tightly around her narrow shoulders.
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Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
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Englanninkielinen Wikipedia

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A young woman possessed by a ghost has slain the Fisher King of the West, Scott Crane. Now, temporarily freed from that malevolent spirit, she seeks to restore the King to life. But Crane's body has been taken to the magically protected home of Pete and Angelica Sullivan, and their adopted son, Koot Hoomie. Kootie is destined to be the next Fisher king, but he is only thirteen years old--too young, his mother thinks, to perform the rituals to assume the Kingship. But not too young, perhaps, to assist in reuniting Scott Crane's body and spirit, and restoring him to life.

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