His highly distinctive brand of fantasy—vastly complex, set in intensely realized locations, riddled with skeins of occult conspiracy and featuring protagonists whose involvement with the supernatural follows a dark perverse logic chillingly threatening to body and soul—began to take definitive shape with The Drawing of the Dark (1979), a memorable vision of King Arthur reincarnated to save Vienna from the Turkish siege of 1529.

Powers' most famous single novel, The Anubis Gates (1983), was one of its decade's most compelling adventure tales in any medium, taking a modern scholar of Romanticism back in time to his subject period, a pilgrimage entailing exchanges of bodies, visits to a fantasticated pre-Victorian London underworld and confrontations with superbly depicted sorcerous evildoers; scarcely less vivid were Dinner at Deviant's Palace (1985), a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the background of a devastated future America, and On Stranger Tides (1987), a fuliginous story of Blackbeard the pirate king and lunatic questings after immortality in 18th-century Florida.

After these triumphs, Powers began to write longer, perhaps more considered but still hectically detailed and paced fantasies. The Stress of Her Regard (1989) is an astonishing take on possession, a secret history of inorganic life that explains in nightmarish terms the genius and the downfall of the great Romantic poets. The huge Fisher King trilogy followed, made up of Last Call (1992), Expiration Date (1995) and Earthquake Weather (1997); accounts of magical influences and mythic resurrections on and around America's West Coast, these books insinuate opulent levels of strangeness beneath modern America's veil of normality, to bizarre and potently subversive effect. The mystical underbelly of the 20th century is unveiled with especial virtuosity in Declare (2000), in which djinni and arcane rituals put a rather unaccustomed complexion on the Cold War, and Cold War and Californian concerns mingle cogently in Powers' latest novel, Three Days to Never, published in August 2006 by William Morrow and, in a lavish limited edition, by Subterranean Press.

Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Tim Powers in June 2006, concentrating on Three Days to Never and his short fiction, collected in Strange Itineraries (Tachyon 2005).At first glance, your new novel, Three Days to Never, seems very different from your previous book, Declare. Declare was a big, elaborate historical conspiracy thriller, ranging the world and constructing a secret history of the 20th century; Three Days is shorter, more focused, set entirely in California within the space of a few days in 1987. But are the novels really in such contrast? One continuity is a shared Cold War background: occult secret weapons, the Israeli intelligence service ...

Powers: Three Days to Never is a smaller-focus book, for sure. But yes, I did want to play a bit with espionage again! Espionage lends itself so smoothly to fantasy—everybody has some real purpose that's at odds with their evident purpose, nobody can be trusted, anybody at all might be involved, on either side, and even the sides aren't clear—that there's already a kind of van Vogt tone to it, even before you start complicating the picture with supernatural stuff.

And it's solidly real-world. I always think fantasy needs to be firmly stapled onto real stuff, and the Mossad and the National Security Agency help give the story, I hope, a plausible look! Along with things like Ford pickup trucks and Pee-Wee Herman movies.Three Days is a return to the contemporary, Southwestern territory of your '90s Fisher King trilogy (Last Call, Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather); there are similarities of magical concept, like the ghosts speaking over telephone lines. Is Three Days in any sense a loose prequel, or companion volume, to the trilogy?

Powers: No, it's not connected to the Last Call trilogy, though I was briefly tempted to have some character from the trilogy walk though, like Alfred Hitchcock did in his movies. Actually I did seriously consider putting the two main characters from Declare, elderly now, in Palm Springs, but there really wasn't room in the plot for them.

I just find Southern California an endlessly fertile setting. Los Angeles, Hollywood, the Mojave Desert, the ocean. And its history is full of legends and dramas and Chinatown-type secrets, but unlike Europe there are only a couple of centuries you have to keep track of!Three Days makes extensive use of Kabbalistic magic and belief. The Kabbalah is popular these days; why do you think that is, and what drew you to it as a fictional resource?

Powers: I always look for the supernatural system most indigenous to the situation I'm writing about—voodoo for Caribbean pirates, genies for Arabs—and since the idea for this book started with some puzzles about Einstein's life and expanded to include Israel, Kabbalah seemed indicated! And so I read a lot about Kabbalah, and—reading it with Einstein in mind, with that polarity—I found lots of hints of advanced physics in it! And a lot of other good stuff too, like dybbuks and golems.

It was useful in that there's a whole lot of versions of Kabbalah, over a whole lot of centuries and a whole lot of countries. I could pick the bits that fit my story and say, "This is the real core version."

I imagine it's popular these days because it's basically Gnostic—"secret wisdom," the idea of finding ancient supernatural stuff the authorities wanted to suppress. You see it in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, but the attraction in such things goes at least as far back as Lovecraft's Necronomicon!The magician figure grounding Three Days is Albert Einstein, inventor of the time-travel method the opposing groups in the novel are trying to control. Why Einstein? Did he truly have such a mystical side to his intellect?

Powers: Well, no, I don't think he did, really—no more than did other "magicians" in my books, like Bugsy Siegel or Blackbeard the pirate. But Einstein did go to a séance with Charlie Chaplin!

I originally considered Einstein just because his hair turned white in 1928 after he had some kind of heart attack in the Swiss Alps. I thought, "What really happened there?" And he had this secret illegitimate daughter in 1902 who completely disappears from history. In real life I suppose she died of scarlet fever as an infant, but what might be another explanation?

And so I read a dozen biographies of him, with my "Where's the supernatural?" polarity, and found lots of my sort of "clues," which led me to read up on Kabbalah and the Mossad and Charlie Chaplin and silent movies, and my work-mode paranoia eventually found a big, consistent supernatural thing going on!There are a lot of references in Three Days to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Einstein as Prospero ... Why are these Shakespearean analogies so appropriate?

Powers: Given my notion that Einstein took his daughter with him into his exile from Europe, and given that he had rescued a ghosty thing that rebelled against him and fixated on his daughter, the Tempest parallel occurred to me early on. So I read The Tempest, looking for lines and plot developments that could be grafted into my story, and I found a number of them! So the Shakespeare element was sort of appropriate to start with, and then I torqued the book to make it a closer fit.

That was probably why I made our protagonist a literature professor—so that he and his precocious daughter could usefully note the parallels. And he and his daughter become a kind of Prospero and Miranda couple too, with a different "Caliban."Indeed: The father and daughter characters central to Three Days, Frank and Daphne Marrity, have a close bond (a telepathic one, in fact!), yet the plot emphasizes how fragile their relationship simultaneously is. Their family tree is full of breakups and apparent desertions ... Would it be fair to call Three Days a family saga of sorts, a dramatization of the vulnerability of families in general?

Powers: Well, I like the "family saga" idea! And the book does show a lot of vulnerability in family relationships, which you assume should be solid. And our protagonist is shown evidence that he'll eventually be a bad father, so that like Oedipus he can start trying to prevent that future. (I think he does prevent it, incidentally, and I'm the writer, so my opinion has weight! Though I'm not certain.)

I guess it's a part of the Philip K. Dick reality-earthquake effect—nothing proves to be absolutely solid, and you might turn around one day to find that even your own core loyalties and character have eroded away. Family ties are something we usually take for granted, so it's useful to fracture them too.The morally ambivalent Charlotte Sinclair, who is blind but can see out of the eyes of others physically near her, is one of your most striking creations. Her bizarre childhood, her strange visual knack, her preposterous efforts at evil—how did you first conceive of her?

Powers: I read a book called Remote Viewers, by Jim Schabel—very convincing book!—about military experiments in clairvoyance, and it seemed like too interesting a situation not to have some character come out of it. And the idea of being able to see what other people are seeing suggested, "What if that were the only way a person could see?"

And then given the option, provided by the plot, of going back in time to undo an intolerable sin in one's past, I naturally decided to give her a few such sins. I'm glad you found her striking—I'm fond of her myself!Another figure harboring ethical conflicts in Three Days is the Mossad field chief, Oren Lepidopt. Why his curious surname? And does he summarize the continuing dilemma of Israel, how to survive as a state without perpetrating tyrannical violence?

Powers: I just came up with his name by cutting the "ery" off of the interesting word "lepidoptery." It doesn't mean anything, I just thought it made a neat name. (I may do that too often, with characters named things like Mothertongue and Mammalian.) And no, I didn't mean him to represent Israel! Just the old John Le Carré dilemma of anybody doing secret-service-type work: How far will you go toward sacrificing other people for a noble goal, or even toward sacrificing yourself? And in this plot, he's able to sacrifice the whole extent of his life, not just the bits that lie in the future. I made him Mossad because Israel was so prominent in the plot-bits I came across—Einstein's devotion to the state of Israel, Chaplin's anti-anti-Semitism, and of course all the Kabbalah mythology and Old Testament stuff.

I got a lot of help with the Israel details from friends who live there, and then we got to actually visit Israel last October. The book was already finished by then, but I got a few first-hand details of Tel Aviv to put in. I hope we get to go back again soon; it's a great place with wonderful people.The villains of Three Days are the so-called Vespers, members of a secret society connected with old-time Christian heresies—Gnosticism, Albigensianism. Why that theological background?

Powers: Since the bad guys are anti-Israel, when I was putting them together I initially read up on the roots of Nazism, and that led me to the Thule Society and a lot of the weird Nazi mysticism. These proto-Nazis were interested in the Grail and that spear Christ is supposed to have been stabbed with, and that led me to the Cathars, the Albigensians, who are supposed to have preserved those things.

And then Gnosticism, and particularly the Albigensian heresy, are so incompletely documented and allegedly perverse (anti-sex, anti-food) that I could be pretty free in saying what a 20th-century version of them might be trying to do. I could use their old phrases like "transmigration of the soul" and say they actually referred to time travel, and so forth. I love murky spots in history!You've remarked in the past that magic always damages, indeed ruins, its users. Three Days certainly bears that out, witness the fates of Golze, Rascasse, "Derek Marrity," Mishal. Why do you underline this point so consistently in your work?

Powers: It just seems to me natural, obvious, that if magic was real it would be damaging to the practitioner. (Probably that's an effect of me being Catholic.) Magic always seems to work by short-circuiting the natural laws—like kiting checks, or putting a penny behind the fuse, or taking "hair of the dog" to cure a hangover. It gets you past immediate problems, but at the cost of much bigger problems later on.

And in plot terms, it's much more useful to have a powerful element like magic be inherently very damaging—spiritually and physically—than to have it be just a morally neutral technology. If a character simply has "the gift of healing," it might as well be "the gift of penicillin." I want magic to have the vertiginous effects and scary consequences of violating reality.Three Days to Never again demonstrates your extraordinary ability to build a bewildering plethora of clues, intuitive associations and symbols into a masterfully integrated novelistic plot and accompanying metaphysical framework. How do you manage to keep so many fictional balls in the air all at once?

Powers: Well, I do massive outlining! As I read research books—on anything that seems even remotely connected to my story—I constantly make notes of "things that are too cool not to use," and then when I've got a whole pile of those I start to assemble and arrange them into a cause-and-effect plot and fit it all into a strict calendar. I make notes to myself every step of the way; sometimes I think my system for plotting a book is designed for someone with no short-term memory at all. And then when it's all outlined, with all the plot bits carefully arranged and graded for emphasis, the actual writing of the book is just "follow the arrows."Moving to your recent comprehensive story collection, Strange Itineraries: it's a wonderful book, but comparatively brief. Why've you written so little short fiction across the years?

Powers: I find I outline short stories nearly as obsessively as I outline novels, and so I figure, Why not go ahead and make it a novel? And I like the elbow room a novel lets you have—in a short story every paragraph has to pay its way and perform at least a couple of functions. (Now I'd hate to have somebody pick a paragraph out of one of my stories and ask me to show how it does those things! But ideally.) And in a novel you can bring in all sorts of parallel events and characters, while in a short story you have to focus on just a couple.

Short stories are harder!You did publish a story chapbook early this year—The Bible Repairman (brilliant title!); and another, A Soul in a Bottle, is forthcoming (both Subterranean Press). What can we expect from A Soul in a Bottle?

Powers: A Soul in a Bottle is a ghost story, hinging on a guy finding an old book of poems with one sonnet that appears in no other copy of the book. It takes place on and around Hollywood Boulevard, and I used the footprints and handprints in the Chinese Theater forecourt, as I did in Three Days to Never too. I'm fascinated with that place. My wife and I always take out-of-town visitors there on our L.A. tours, even if they complain it's just a tourist spot—I mean, why do you think it is a tourist spot? One event in the story, a confrontation with a balloon salesman in the forecourt there, actually happened, and Walter Jon Williams is a witness. I hope the balloon salesman doesn't sue me now.Rumor has it that your next novel will, like The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard, be set in 19th-century England. How is the research towards that going? Is the title firm yet?

Powers: No, the title is totally provisional. I might as well call it Tess of the Baskervilles at this point. I've only started doing the research—reading all sorts of books on Victorian London and people of the time, and the technologies and cuisines and drink preferences—so I have no real idea what sorts of plot bits will show up to indicate what the book will be about. I'm thinking this might be a good excuse for me to reread all the Sherlock Holmes stories! It's been way too long.