• Tim Powers, The Mills of the Gods

Reviewed by John Hertz:  It was published last December, just in time to be Hugo-eligible. Is that a hint? Who, me? You’ll decide for yourself.

Powers’ imagination is superb. His storytelling is excellent. We throw the word unique around; he’s certainly unusual. And strange.

He dreams up things you may never have thought of. Or maybe you knew them all along. But with the mastery of a fine speculative-fiction author (in which I include both science fiction and fantasy, although Heinlein said not to) he shows what those things — or beings, some of them — would do if they were brought into these circumstances. Have they been already? As the late great John Trimble said in a demanding moment, I won’t tell you.

At the front is “All the characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.” How can that be, when Sylvia Beach, Le Corbusier, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas – not in order of appearance, or importance – are here? You’ll decide for yourself.

Also at the front is “The mills of the gods grind slowly;/ But this mill/ Chatters in mechanical staccato,” attributed to Hemingway. He really did write that, in 1923, two years before the events in this book. Does that matter? You’ll —

A.J. Budrys, one of our best authors and one of our best critics, which seldom go together, said “Always ask, Why are they telling us this?” That certainly applies to a Tim Powers story, including this one. As I’ve said before of Powers, Nothing is revealed does not apply.

I happen to be a Heinlein fan. If you just left, too bad for you. He often employed the Heinlein Double Surprise: something strange happens, then something really strange happens. Powers doesn’t do that. He takes the bull by the horns — deliberate metaphor in discussing this book. Stranger and stranger things — or beings, some of them — keep happening.

An unlikely woman, and an unlikely man, meet on the first page. In our own day a friend of mine satirizes movie posters as She’s got a gun. Well, this woman does. And how did she enter a locked room? All those keep coming in.

Someone thinks The Catholic Church is wrong about reincarnation. That keeps coming in too. We labor through and indeed under Paris. We go to Spain. Bullfighting is part of the story, aiee. I warned you. So is purity, which is not a coincidence.

Among Powers’ merits, when many pages (out of three hundred in my hardback copy) work toward a climax, the climax does occur, it is climactic — the meaning of “in the flesh” is also revealed — and if there’s an epilogue, which there is in The Mills, it’s a relief.

What do pistols, and even a gun barrel which some counter-agent cleverly jammed — as characters in Japanese theater often cry, “You won’t get away with it” — have to do with gods? Of course I won’t tell you.