The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Bookshelves: everyone-loved-it-but-me, abandoned, time-travel, magic, sci-fi, monsters-and-such, fantasy, merry-olde-england, reading-challenge
I selected this for my 2017 Reading Challenge (yes, I know we’re well into 2018; I’ve been busy) because I like steampunk and wanted to read the book credited with starting it all. Plus, I love love love time travel.
I am very disappointed, and I feel like I shouldn’t be, which is why I read as far as I did. There’s a lot packed in here–time travel, Egyptian gods and magic, gypsies, a combination bodysnatcher/werewolf, the girl-dressed-as-a-boy (romantic interest later on, no doubt), Coleridge and Lord Byron, homunculi, organized rival bands of beggars like Oliver Twist meets West Side Story, a demented clown on stilts. But for all that, there’s no urgency, nothing compelling. I don’t care about the characters.
Having our hero stuck in Regency England could be fun, but there’s no related conflict. No figuring out how to make tea in an 1810 kitchen, no trying to explain his Gore-Tex and Ray-Bans–the author gives him convenient little saves that keep him from all that (he comes through in period costume and is promptly robbed of his clothes anyway; he is given the almost deus ex machina disguise of a deaf-mute beggar so no one will hear his modern, educated, American speech). He doesn’t even seem to want to go home all that much. He’s a gamepiece being moved about a board, no feeling, no desire.
I see no steampunk elements at all beyond, possibly, a pair of springloaded shoes. There is no science or technology; the time travel and the homunculi are accomplished with magic. Shoes are not enough. I was expecting steampunk.
I’m bored.
Plus, I hate clowns.
DNF-ing at 37%.
Be my friend on Goodreads: View all my reviews
99 Monkeys 