Dear Earthquake Weather, I wanted to love you; I really did. Instead I just about like you, and not a lot. It's not you; it's me. Really. I loved Last Call, and that's where your whole ethos of transplanting grail myth and ancient gods to modern-day America began. I didn't read Expiration Date, which directly precedes you, and maybe that's why things didn't go well between us. It's my fault for not taking the time to get to know where you're coming from. I've known and loved books of all sizes - but I found your 600 pages hard to deal with. I just didn't seem to have the time for your 400 pages of build-up or for the over-crowded rush of the last 50 pages; I wasn't willing to make the effort to care about your characters: the alcoholic widower, the split-personality girl, every personality unpleasant and some downright frightening, the self-righteous shrink-turned-bruja and her non-character husband, the adolescent Fisher King in waiting with, again, no character, and the unpleasant, gun-toting martinet - and these were the good guys. And yet there was so much I wanted to like - I loved the way you wove Greek myth, speculative Shakespeare interpretations, the Mexican loteria cards and more into a frothy, bubbling whole. You're really good with free association and wordplay. There's a lot of eating and drinking and twists in well-known tales, from The Maltese Falcon to The Tale Of Two Cities. Three Latin palindromes at no extra cost! A really creepy villainous shrink with some truly bizarre methods. Then why didn't it work out between us? Maybe it was just that you took too much for granted, let your bulk turn into flab rather than real heft. Maybe you were so caught up in weaving your strange magical-mythical stew that you lost track of character and plot structure. Wow, your plot was all over the place; three different sets of people slowly converging, and I mean slowly, to actually reveal the main aim of the damned story - to resurrect the dead King - and then bungling around, making a botch of things just because they randomly won't listen to each other or the ghost guide they've summoned out of no apparent reason other than utter cussedness and wanting the novel to go on and on and on. I know life is messy; what's fiction's excuse? And it isn't like this some Beckettian novel of the absurdity of literature and language and possibly life; it's an exercise in a deeply plot-driven genre. And you just spent way too much time showing people eating, drinking and bickering. I know Robert Jordan was doing pretty well with novels like that at the time; were you just trying to be like the cool kids? Was that it? Or no, really, it was me. I know you tried hard; I know I could have tried harder. I shouldn't have expected you to be another Last Call; that was unfair. Every novel can't be Last Call, and why should you? Please don't take this badly. I'm sure you'll find someone else. This is goodbye, JP
Unfortunately, Tim Powers' "Earthquake Weather" (the third, and final, book in his "Fault Lines" series) is bad enough that I could no longer force myself to read it after the 34% point. There's nothing special about that point in the book. It's just the place where I finally admitted to myself that I was avoiding picking it up any more. This is the first of Powers' books where that's happened. It's a shame that it's happening in the final book of a series, but it's not much of a series. The first two books are entirely stand-alone and independent of each other. They only form part of a series because Powers decided to fold the characters and mythologies together for this book. Since "Last Call" is pretty good and "Expiration Date" is OK, just read those and stop. This book isn't necessary for either of those books. However, if you do decide to read "Earthquake Weather," be aware that you'll need to have read those other two books first. Otherwise, nothing here will make any sense.So, why do I think the book's worth only a Not Very Good 2 stars out of 5? Primarily because of how nasty it is. Neither of the earlier books was exactly a bed of roses, but this one just goes too far. Not only does Powers dwell far too much on the horrible things some of the characters are doing, many of the characters, themselves, are bad people. And these are some of the people whose heads he's got us inside (the actual protagonists, to boot). Ugh. A close second to the nastiness, is the fact that the characters are inconsistent. Not only do they not act as they should from the previous books, they don't act consistently from moment to moment: their behaviors swing wildly from knowledgeable, rational actors to idiotic lunatics. And, finally, the two previous books used two different mythologies for their "magic." In "Earthquake Weather," he combines the existence of those two mythologies. The problem with that is that the combined mythos just becomes unwieldy. Not only that, but by the end of "Expiration Date," Powers was extending the "ghost" mythos to fairly silly levels. He's continued that here.So, if the book is so bad that I couldn't finish it, why am I rating it at 2 stars instead of 1? Because I've read worse (far worse). Powers is still a good author. His knowledge of the material, his descriptive abilities, his prose, itself, are all still good. It's "just" the nastiness, the characters, and their actions I don't like here [g]. So, I'm upping my rating by one star.The novels in Tim Powers' "Fault Lines" series are:1. Last Call2. Expiration Date (The Fault Lines Trilogy Book 2)3. Earthquake Weather (The Fault Lines Trilogy Book 3)
What do You think about Earthquake Weather (1998)?
In "Earthquake Weather", Tim Powers ties together the modern day mythologies in "Last Call" and "Expiration Date" and has written a joint sequel to both books. The current Fisher King has been slain but his friends travel across the American West looking for help in restoring him to life.
—Mark Singer
Not as enjoyable as Last Call or Expiration Date. The problem seems to be that Powers is intent on cramming far too much into this one book; all the king-related ideas from Last Call, and all the ghost concepts from Expiration Date make it into Earthquake Weather, as well as whole bundle of Dionysian mythology. The whole thing feels rushed, as if Powers doesn't have time to fully develop any plot-point because he's in too much of a hurry to get on to the next brilliant one. Not a bad book, but definitely not Powers' best.
—Eric Smith
I really liked the first one of this series, but I found the characters really unlikable in the second one, which was subsequently magnified in this book a thousandfold, and ultimately I couldn't finish it. I love Tim powers but the whole thing fell apart about halfway through, and I found reading it became a chore, so I just put it down. As always Tim Powers writes beautifully, but I could not find a single main character to empathize with in this novel. There's the weak, alcoholic, whiny widower who falls in love with the obnoxiously abrasive alcoholic blonde with annoying multiple personalities and the ghost of her psycopathic father living in her head- Then there's the bossy, domineering condecending psychoanalyst-turned-mexican-witch who's married to the pliant, too-cooprerative guy with Houdini's pacificst hands who can't hold a gun or stick up for himself, and then there's their "son"- the Indian-American prince to inherit the Fisher King throne, which despite the clamor to attain it, seems to be nothing but a huge pain in the ass to serve as, with no apparent advantage. I would have been sympathetic with him but he becomes less and less likable and more and more pathetic and weak as the story advances- in the last book he was a great character- but he's become a shadow of the kid who carried the ghost of THomas Edison in his head in the last book. Then there are the charachters from the first book- the bald pregnant queen who is almost a noncharacter, the "dead" king who is like the body in Law and Order- maybe someone famous but not much of a conversationalist and can't save a bad script. Mavranos- Arky- he was my favoritefrom the first book (which I really did like a lot!)- but even he becomes more despicable- and his nonstop alcoholism is just annoying in this book. In the first novel he had a reason- he had heard that a particular brand of beer warded off the terminal cancer he was dying of- but now the self destructiveness is exactly the opposite of what he should be doing after living through the impossible cure of his brain tumour. Anyway, maybe it gets better- but I couldn't bring myself to wad any further through it. Tim Powers- I still count you among my favorite authors but this was a real dissapointment D:
—Esmeralda Rupp-Spangle
