Review of Declare by Tim Powers

"I made it an ironclad rule
that I could not change
or disregard any of the recorded facts,
nor rearrange any days of the calendar –
and then I tried to figure out
what momentous but unrecorded fact
could explain them all."
—Timothy Thomas Powers

Andrew Hale is a spy for MI6, mysteriously recruited when he was just a boy with the blessing of his mother, he is the creature of James Theodora of the SIS. In 1963 Hale is reactivated after having performed his duty during World War II, he is finally lead to complete a secret operation centered around Mount Ararat called Declare that eventually causes the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Although the novel revolves around a city of djinn, the mythical beings described both in the Koran and the Thousand and One Nights, it is also a "secret history" of the famous Soviet double agent Kim Philby.

Powers weaves this story expertly, if not eloquently, using carefully researched facts, mixed, modified and explained by Middle Eastern mythology and glossed by the Kippling novel Kim, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Wordsworth's Prelude and the book of Job 38:4 from where the name of the fictional covert operation Declare is taken:

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding.

It is also strongly sourced by St. John Philby's book The Empty Quarter (Rub' al Khali) St.John, father of the famous spy named Kim, who's name is taken from Kipling's novel of the same name. This is the kind of double and triple ironies you can expect from any of Power's secret history novels, from the tarot centered story of the Fisher King in his Las Vegas set Last Call, to the spiritual science of Albert Einstein and Charles Chaplin in the time travel extravaganza, Three Days to Never.


Powers delivers the goods with a story that makes perfect, if supernatural, sense, does not lean too heavily on these supernatural elements, nor abuse their flexibility and provides a narrative complex enough to be entertaining of it's own accord as a spy novel. Indeed, if one were entertained by such things, one might get lost in the Wikiverse looking up all the references in just one Powers' novel.

Paul Luap

Many of us are coming back to science fiction after a long hiatus. Perhaps we became snobs about great literature at some point. I know that after my sophomore year in college at University of North Texas I picked up a Frank Herbert novel after reading Light In August and couldn't get through the first two pages.

The sentences. It was like a child was writing them. Awkward doesn't begin to describe it. Also existentially jarring since the first thing that comes to one's mind is that you have been mistaken about something's excellence and have told other's of this excellence and more sophisticated minds must have kept their eyes from rolling completely back in their heads and laughing derisively.

Something must have happened in the interim. SF writers got better. Tim Powers and Ian M. Banks are the first two I began reading again, primarily through the fact that Ian Banks wrote a novel that Melody Townsel told me was crap and I always read everything she doesn't like. She doesn't like Cormac McCarthy either.