The Mills of the Gods by Tim Powers
BAEN Books (December 2025)
Review by W.D. Gagliani
A new novel by two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author Tim Powers (author of The Anubis Gates, The Stress of Her Regard, Declare, On Stranger Tides, and the Last Call/Fisher King trilogy, and many others) is always cause to celebrate.
There’s really no one who does what Powers does, and even though he’s one of the several writers credited with inventing Steampunk (along with James P. Blaylock and K.W. Jeter), it’s his “secret history” that so often makes the blood run faster. Full disclosure: the novels of Tim Powers have made my blood run faster since I read The Anubis Gates when it was first published in 1983 and won the Philip K. Dick Award. Each subsequent novel is a master class in blending history, fantasy, spot-on cinematic plotting, and good old-fashioned swashbuckling… often disguised as “urban fantasy” with horror undertones and masking an almost subliminal but strong moral streak exhibited by protagonists whose dilemmas are of epic proportions.
Secret history (as opposed to alternate history) is the use of historical facts linked by “secret” or unknown connections and motivations. Powers uses meticulous research to place people and events exactly where they belong in their historical period, but he manages to connect them with fantastic and/or supernatural forces, creating new motivations for how things “worked out” in history.
For instance: In The Stress of Her Regard, we learn the Romantic poets’ (Byron, Shelley, and Keats) true source of inspiration. In Declare, the real-life Kim Philby spy case blends well with John Le Carre`-style Cold War shenanigans, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Arabian Nights. In Three Days to Never, Powers blends Albert Einstein and his estranged daughter, a missing Charlie Chaplin movie, Kaballah-trained Mossad agents, a mysterious deadly group known as the Vespers, astral projection, pyrokinesis, time travel, dybbuks, and a magical Baphomet head — with the 1987 Harmonic Convergence. In My Brother’s Keeper he delves into the lives of the Brontë sisters — with werewolves. On Stranger Tides is a classic pirate novel paired with Blackbeard, lots of magic — and the fountain of youth (and it was reworked/cannibalized into the fourth Disney Pirates of the Caribbean movie). Go farther back and that wonderful gateway drug The Anubis Gates blends time travel, a subterranean Victorian London ruled by a twistedly evil clown, and Egyptian magic. All of them classics in their own right, they’ll stick with you and stand up to rereading. And, really, those not noted here are just as enthralling.
In The Mills of the Gods Powers leaves his more recent L.A.-inspired Alternate Routes (Vickery and Castine) trilogy behind and returns to the greater palette of world history with a typical example of his “secret” version, albeit in a more concise and punchier package than the meaty Declare, for instance. It’s 1925, a few short years after the Great War, and American veteran Harry Nolan is now a denizen of the Parisian bohemian scene, eking out a living as an illustrator for a low-level literary journal. While illustrating a manuscript — a wild tale told by an old bullfighter to a little-known writer, about a bull-headed god who grants reincarnation to subjects offering up children as sacrifices and the goddess who comes to earth to kill him — he is approached by a young woman who wants only to read the pages. Vivi Chastain is an orphan who grew up with another person inside her head, a sauteur whose takeover of her own identity was interrupted. Sauteurs (or “jumpers”) are reincarnated in chosen orphan children raised for the purpose, a process which will erase the children’s own identities in favor of the old ones who lust for renewed life. Vivi must banish the reincarnate’s encroaching identity before he overwhelms hers. A band of savage street children (who aren’t children at all) are after the same manuscript and will kill for it, and have. The manuscript’s author is a little-known writer by the name of Ernest Hemingway.
Nolan is swept up in this dramatic secret conflict between the followers of one god — the Phoenician God Moloch, that eater of children — and those of the goddess that would oppose him — the Roman goddess Cybele, who exacts her own awful price — partly because Vivi is such a force of nature and because his valiant knight-errant’s gene is activated by her gritty tenacity. The quest to bring about the gods’ final battle takes them through the city’s streets as well as both the below-worlds (the catacombs) and above-worlds (the towers of Notre Dame), and eventually to a remote ancient Spanish bullring where it all converges and their secret knowledge will prove either true… or tragically false.
Besides a gruff young Hemingway, other Paris luminaries of the literary and art world appear as well — Gertrude Stein (whose modernist work of poetry Tender Buttons is more weapon than book) and her partner Alice B. Toklas, the eccentric Pablo Picasso, and Sylvia Beach, whose bookstore Shakespeare and Company provided many like them with camaraderie and a message-taking system. Along the way Powers paints a lively portrait of Paris itself as a character, even recruiting the city’s famous cat population as matagots, magical feline spirits of French folklore, following the once-directionless Nolan as he makes Vivi’s quest his own, leading to a Cinemascope climactic battle between gods and mortals.
There is no Tim Powers novel that will not enthrall with its blend of fact and fantasy, and there seems to be no end of intriguing real-life connections between demonstrably actual world events. It’s all fuel for the Powers touch, which evokes Indiana Jones-style adventure but at its best also dares to pull aside the curtain that may well shroud the universe’s secret machinations — and how we mere humans might face and vanquish the forces of evil that reside there. Somewhat recalling the structure of The Anubis Gates, The Mills of the Gods is entertainment on a grand scale and Powers fans will love its vibrant palette. And hopefully new fans will, too.
