History Creator / TimPowers

* AssimilationPlot: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the villains are using ancient magic to create a HiveMind that, once established, will proceed to suck in the entire human race. The people involved in the plot (and the earlier failed attempts that preceded it) vary in their motivations; some of them genuinely believe it will make the world a better place, some have more selfish intentions, and some just find themselves hard to live with and want a way to escape a burden of guilt or depression.

* BackupFromOtherworld: In ''Alternate Routes'', the ghost of the protagonist's wife intervenes to help him a few times during the climactic struggle. [[spoiler:Thanks to one of the stranger features of the afterlife featured in the novel, he also gets assistance from the ghost of their daughter who never existed in the first place.]]
* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 dancing plague of 1518]], the destruction of the standing sets for ''Film/TheTenCommandments1923'', and the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sunken_City Sunken City catastrophe]] were all fallout from earlier failed attempts at the same kind of AssimilationPlot the villain is about to pull off.
* BlastingItOutOfTheirHands: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the hero shoots a gun out of the hand of the bad guy who's shooting at him, because it's the only part of the gunman he can see clearly and he doesn't want to kill him anyway. It's noted that the gunman's hand is seriously injured by having the gun blasted out of it, and remains a handicap for the rest of the book.

* BusmansVocabulary: The villain of ''Forced Perspectives'' has a computer science background, as do some of his underlings, and they describe the psychic phenomena their plot revolves around using computer networking metaphors. It's also used as a generational indicator: the members of the plot from the 1960s that he's attempting to revive used a telephone switchboard analogy to describe the same phenomena, while his Gen Z nieces use a metaphor about smartphone apps.
* ChekhovsHobby: In ''Alternate Routes'', it's a recurring thing that the protagonist and his late wife used to go hang-gliding together, and it's mentioned once near the beginning that he made the hang-gliders himself. The climax of the novel involves him having to build a hang-glider out of improvised materials and with improvised tools in order to escape from the place where he's trapped.

* CompellingVoice: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the twins Lexi and Amber can take temporary control of nearby people and make them perform an action. They mostly use it for small indulgences like persuading their babysitter to give them more dessert. Mostly.

* CreepyChild: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the young twins Lexi and Amber have a powerful and complicated TwinTelepathy that contributes to them acting in disconcerting and sometimes dangerous ways. Although the latter have a lot to do with their evil guardian trying to twist them to serve his own ends, and after one of the heroes takes them under his wing, there are indications that in a more wholesome environment they'll become less creepy.

* ElectromagneticGhosts: In ''Alternate Routes'', ghosts can make their voices heard on radios and their faces appear in the static on an untuned analog TV set (although since the story is set after the switch to digital TV signals, the only character who ''has'' an analog TV set is a ghost peddler who keeps an old one around specifically for communicating with ghosts with).

* {{Fingore}}: In ''Forced Perspectives'', a gunman working for the villain has his gun blasted out of his hand during a fight with the hero. Several of his fingers are seriously injured; his boss refuses to let him get them professionally patched up, because that would lead to official attention they can't afford, and anyway if their AssimilationPlot works physical injuries will become irrelevant. The condition of the fingers worsens over the course of the book to the point that they're decaying and need to be amputated.

* ISeeDeadPeople: In ''Alternate Routes'' and its sequel ''Forced Perspectives'', ghosts can only be seen by those who have some link with someone who has become a ghost (such as being the one who killed them). People in that condition can see all ghosts, not just the particular one they're linked to, and may not be able to immediately tell that they're not a living person.
* TheLegendOfChekhov: In ''Alternate Routes'', there's a story several of the characters have heard about a man who was driving on the Los Angeles freeways in the 1960s when he drove off an exit that hadn't been there the day before and wasn't the day after and found himself in the afterlife, and eventually made it back to the world of the living with a mysterious artifact. The story is true; the protagonist eventually meets the man, who helps him figure out what's going on.
* LivingMemory: The ghosts in ''Alternate Routes'' and its sequel ''Forced Perspectives'' are just living echoes of people who have died in mystically significant circumstances, not the actual souls of the departed. In the latter novel, the metaphysical paradox of a ghost not being who they believe they are is fundamental to how the villain is defeated.

* MilesGloriosus: In ''Forced Perspectives'', Foster, one of the villain's underlings, is boastful about his combat prowess to the point that even his colleagues find it irritating, and the first time he comes up against an opponent who knows how to fight back it becomes apparent how little of his boasting has substance to back it up.
* MonochromePast: In ''Forced Perspectives'', some of the characters are able to see visions of the past, which appear in-universe in sepia tones. One of the characters speculates that the visions include infrared light spectra that aren't normally visible to human eyes and which their brains are interpreting as a coppery color.
* PsychicAssistedSuicide: The fate of Lexi and Amber's parents in ''Forced Perspectives''.

* SelfMadeOrphan: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the villain manipulates his psychic nieces into inflicting PsychicAssistedSuicide on their parents, as a test of their abilities and to clear the way for him to become their guardian.
* SequelHook: The epilogue of ''Alternate Routes'' has the protagonists discovering that their experiences have given them a new psychic ability, and going their separate ways after agreeing on a way to get back in touch if they need to. Powers went on to write a sequel, ''Forced Perspectives'', which begins with one of them getting in touch with the other to arrange a meeting after their new ability apparently starts going wrong.
* ShoutOut: In ''Forced Perspectives'', the nonsense phrase Vickery recites to resist interrogation is a line from the anti-interrogation earworm in ''Literature/TheDemolishedMan''.

* StrawNihilist: The villain in ''Alternate Routes'' is a philosopher who believes that free will and consciousness are just illusions incidental to the deterministic physical processes that operate living bodies. [[spoiler:And in his case, free will has become an illusion because his attitude left him susceptible to becoming a meat puppet for something from Beyond]].
* TwinTelepathy: In ''Forced Perspectives'', identical twins Lexi and Amber Harlowe have such a strong psychic bond that even they can't tell which of them is which. In the backstory, the 1968 attempt at the AssimilationPlot also involved a pair of twins (in that case, fraternal adult twins) with a psychic bond.
* {{Twincest}}: In ''Forced Perspectives'', two of the members of Conrad Chronic's cult were a married couple who secretly were twins who had left their home state behind and faked new, unrelated identities for themselves so they could get married, because their TwinTelepathy left them feeling that they couldn't really connect to anyone else.

* WhenDimensionsCollide: In ''Alternate Routes'', the climactic threat is that the irrational and immaterial otherworld is trying to merge with reality.

* OneSteveLimit: Inverted in the short story "Pat Moore", in which it's a plot point that all the main characters have the same name.

* ShoutOut: The nonsense phrase Vickery recites to resist interrogation is a line from the anti-interrogation earworm in ''Literature/TheDemolishedMan''.

* PsychicAssistedSuicide: The fate of Lexi and Amber's parents in ''Alternate Routes''.

%%* BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy: A recurring feature.

%%* {{Fingore}}: Something horrible happens to at least one character's hands or fingers in each book.

* ISeeDeadPeople: In ''Alternate Routes'', ghosts can only be seen by those who have some link with someone who has become a ghost (such as being the one who killed them). People in that condition can see all ghosts, not just the particular one they're linked to, and may not be able to immediately tell that they're not a living person.

* LivingMemory: The ghosts in ''Alternate Routes'' are just living echoes of people who have died in mystically significant circumstances, not the actual souls of the departed. (Probably. That's what the experts believe, and it's consistent with the ghost lore in some of the other novels, but there's a bit of ambiguity left in it.)