Books: Stolen Skies By Tim Powers (2022)

“Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn’t have—and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him. But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life, to warn Vickery—and now they’re both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence. With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them—in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well. Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor."

Tim Powers uses his unique gift as a Los Angeles based writer to take real locations with bizarre histories and weave a one-of-a-kind tale. Here he uses Giant Rock, located in Landers California, which is known to be a beacon for UFO sightings and even landings. Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine come together one more time to try to derail a UFO landing which will bring devastating effects in its wake. Powers work shines because he looks at places like Los Angeles from a different perspective, finding the dark corners of this City of Angels and to find the macabre and weirdness of this place. If the town has a soul, I guess, he certainly tries to explore it.

While Powers remains one of the more ambitious and unique voices in science fiction and dark fantasy today (he remains an underrated who really deserves a wider audience), for a broader audience, the fact that so little is explained and yet so much is assumed it can be infuriating. Also, for some odd reason, in Stolen Skies, Powers was constantly recapping of events from the first two books, something I found weird and distracting at the same time (not sure why he did this, as most authors writing series don’t do this). The plot is a bit convoluted as well, and it made me feel that Powers was not fully invested in concluding (?) this series.

But for new readers, maybe, this could lead to some of his other works. Some that are really is fantastic, with all that LA secret history, ghosts, and freeway-side gypsy nests.