Audiobook11 hours
Alternate Routes
Written by Tim Powers
Narrated by Bronson Pinchot
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
A New Novel From Award-Winning Master of Fantasy and Science Fiction Tim Powers. A modern ghost story as only Tim Powers can write it. Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways-phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway-and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade. Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to-and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out. Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them.
Author
Tim Powers
Tim Powers is the author of numerous novels including Hide Me Among the Graves, Three Days to Never, Declare, Last Call, and On Stranger Tides, which inspired the feature film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. He has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award twice, and the World Fantasy Award three times. He lives in San Bernardino, California.
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Reviews for Alternate Routes
Rating: 3.6463415609756096 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
41 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Predictable. Not as good as the other Tim Powers books
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I probably would have liked this novel better had I read it before the COVID outbreak, and the possible threat of major-power military action, in that I'm in the emotional space where a story trading on looming existential threat has a lot of hurdles to get over. Still, the high concepts that Powers offers you are never less than interesting, and the climax of this story, involving a metaphysical labyrinth with the potential to seriously damage the reality of the characters, was actually pretty good. Maybe my problem boils down to how I'm not sure that Powers has ever really created a female POV character that has really impressed me, and I needed more from Castine; to be fair, my reading in Powers' backlist is not all it could be.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Alternate Routes is a combination of the myth of Daedalus and the horror with which long-time residents of Los Angeles regard their infamous freeway system. I’m not an Angeleno, but I don’t find a supernatural conjunction between the LA freeways and the Minotaur’s Labyrinth at all implausible.To give you an idea of how differently writers of fantastical literature have approached similar subjects, consider Gregory Benford’s Artifact. Benford went with a de-mythologizing, hard sci-fi take on the Minotaur, making it a magnetic monopole trapped in a cube of stone. Powers has none of that. His Minotaur is a primordial force of nature, or anti-nature, and it wants out of its prison, insofar as such a thing can be said to want anything. Even when two authors choose to mine the same source material for a book, the end result is very different after being refracted through their own choices. Although I will give Benford high marks for his obvious love of Boston in that book.Of course, Powers also brings in ghosts, because that is just how he rolls. Yet, Powers manages to make Alternate Routes feel different than his previous books featuring ghosts and Los Angeles. Rather unlike his ghosts, who just endlessly repeat the same things over and over because they lack a vital spark, Powers instead is riffing on a theme. The spectral remnants of Expiration Date were mostly idiots, echoes in time and space, primarily useful for the nefarious purposes of the living. The ghosts in Alternate Routes have both more pathos and more malevolence, a greater propensity to exact revenge or seek forgiveness.Which is thematically appropriate, as Powers is here playing with chaos and order, free will and determinism, as contraries with the Golden Mean, humanity, somewhere in-between. The myth of Daedalus the Artificer, the root of Greek mechanical ingenuity, is contrasted with the fundamental disorder of the Minotaur, and yet neither is complete, nor independent of the other.In much the same way, the chaos of the LA freeways is enabled by the very technological prowess that made it possible to build such things. As an Arizonan, I find the stop-and-go traffic of the LA freeways and their improvised and chaotic exchanges maddening compared to Phoenix, another desert city five hours east with a far better freeway system. My wife’s late grandfather Bill, who lived nearly his whole life in Los Angeles, delighted in using his detailed knowledge of the surface streets to route us around blockages on the LA freeways. I’ve met many others who feel much the same. I too feel that the LA freeways are a kind of infernal nexus, but it takes Tim Powers to wrap that frustration into a story of myth and legend which also happens to be quite an adventure.As is typical for him, Powers also works in themes of intense personal loss, redeemed with Catholic hope. Daedalus’ son Icarus plunged into the sea after their escape from the Labyrinth. Sebastian Vickery will not get off any easier, for he must face the existential horror of meeting a potential child who never was; a possible source of joy strangled in the crib by his decision to sterilize himself years before his marriage. Few other writers can put into words the wound that surgical sterilization puts into a marriage, but Powers does.Yet, for all that, Powers puts some whimsy in Alternate Routes, from the Pico Kosher Deli, a reference to Powers’ friend Phil Dick, and Castine’s joke about Route 666, a once extant spur of Route 66 in Arizona and New Mexico.Poetry also plays a big role in Alternate Routes. The epic Metamorphoses by Ovid figures prominently, much as Lewis Carroll did in Expiration Date or T. S. Eliot in Last Call. Knowledge of poetry becomes a powerful defense for Castine and Vickery, but they struggle a bit, as memorizing poetry is no longer common.That got me wondering, who was the last truly popular poet in English? Seuss? Kipling? Poetry is not dead, but is certainly moribund in English. Poetry used to be seen as the pinnacle of literature, pace Ovid, Dante, Homer, Milton, et al., but now it is mostly seen as ridiculous. Powers engaged in some gentle mockery of poetry in The Drawing of the Dark, with the buffoonish Kretchmer fancying himself a poet, to the derision of everyone else.Alternate Routes also feels a bit more topical than I’m used to with Powers, with a nefarious alphabet agency engaged in dubiously legal post-death surveillance of “deleted persons” as an antagonist. Rogue intelligence agents aren’t a new theme with Powers, but whole rogue agencies are.Overall, I found this book fun. Powers is dialing down the secret history, and amping up the myth and adventure. Alternate Routes is fast-paced and full of action, accelerating and decelerating as frequently as traffic on the I-10. His protagonist, Sebastian Vickery, is a relatable everyman, scraping by on the gig economy [with ghosts, of course] after narrowly escaping the rogue agency. I think Powers fans will find this book worthwhile, as well as anyone who likes fantastical adventure.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Los Angeles freeways with off-ramps that appear and disappear, offering a glimpse of an empty desert highway. Covert government agencies with secret agendas and an assortment of oddball characters (real, imagined and somewhere in between) all populate the latest ghost story from the mind of Tim Powers in Alternate Routes. Sebastian Vickery, ex-Secret Service agency living off the grid and driving for supernatural-evasion car service stumbles onto as supernatural events appear to be ramping up and heading for a place where not only his life is in danger, but all of Los Angeles is in danger.Vickery is aided by agent Ingrid Castine, a homeless boy, and a few supernatural or supernatural adjacent friends. In order to save themselves and L.A., they may have to travel down the ghost ramp into that strange desert world of the Labyrinth. A world that few people have returned from. There is no denying that Tim Powers is talented. He creates a fascinating world with enough similarities to our own that the bizarre twists and turns feel more jarring the more you learn about how this world is different. It takes a bit of concentration to follow the turns in the plot, but Powers manages to bring the story together for an exciting conclusion. There are a number of characters who are quite interesting, but Vickery and Castine as the main characters don’t stand out quite enough for the prominent role they play in the story. The audiobook is narrated by Bronson Pinchot who is an amazing voice actor who quickly makes you forget that it is only one person narrating these many characters. Given the ghostly tone of some characters and sections of the book, it does make hearing difficult unless you are in a low-noise environment.The pacing is steady and Powers is always interesting. While an entertaining read/listen, I wouldn’t recommend this as the first book to sample Powers’s writing. If you are already a fan, you will enjoy this book as well.I was provided a copy of this audiobook by the publisher.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ghosts and the freeways of Los Angeles are both familiar Tim Powers elements, and are newly combined with rogue government agency and agents. The hiding from the agency protagonist and the newly rogue agent deal with assassination and apparitions in this fast paced narrative. I didn't find the characterizations up to Powers usual standards and missed the grounding in real personalities that connected his previous LA novels to the landscape.