Forced Perspectives is a 2020 contemporary fantasy novel by Tim Powers. It is the second of a series in which the protagonists are Sebastian Vickery and Ingrid Castine, following Alternate Routes and followed by Stolen Skies.
Following their supernatural experiences in the first novel, Vickery and Castine have acquired an ability to see briefly into the past. Lately, though, it's been going wrong: any time one of them tries to use it, and increasingly even when they don't, what they see is a vision of a decrepit house down by the ocean. Something terrible happened there fifty years ago, and now somebody's trying to make sure it happens again — and they mean for Vickery and Castine to have central roles.
This novel contains examples of:
- Assimilation Plot: The villains are using ancient magic to create a Hive Mind 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.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: The dancing plague of 1518
, the destruction of the standing sets for The Ten Commandments (1923), and the Sunken City catastrophe were all fallout from earlier failed attempts at the same kind of Assimilation Plot the villain is about to pull off. - Blasting It Out of Their Hands: Vickery 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.
- Busman's Vocabulary: The villain 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.
- Celebrity Resemblance: Vickery refers to Faroukh as "Omar Sharif" before learning his real name.
- Compelling Voice: 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.
- Creepy Child: The young twins Lexi and Amber have a powerful and complicated Twin Telepathy 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.
- Deadly Euphemism: The conspirators use "had to take his blood pressure" for disposing of someone who knows too much.
- Fingore: A gunman working for the villain has his gun blasted out of his hand during a fight with Vickery. 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 Assimilation Plot 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.
- Foreshadowing: Castine mentions that she's been transferred to Naval Intelligence, and Vickery mentions that his current cover identity has an interest in UFOs which he uses to provide a harmless explanation for his occult activities. Neither fact is relevant in this novel, but both become significant in the next one.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The climax of the novel takes place on Halloween. It's implied that the original architect of the conspiracy deliberately designed it to come to fruition on Halloween, for the symbolism.
- I See Dead People: 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 it's not a living person.
- Living Memory: The ghosts are just living echoes of people who have died in mystically significant circumstances, not the actual souls of the departed. The metaphysical paradox of a ghost not being who they believe they are is fundamental to how the threat is defeated.
- Meaningful Echo: Early in the novel, when Castine isn't sure yet that the villains are after them both, she questions Vickery's statement that they're "after us", and he defends himself by saying "I'm part of 'us'." Later, another character asks Vickery why he's so determined to rescue Castine, and the reply he comes up with is "She's part of 'us'."
- Miles Gloriosus: 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.
- Monochrome Past: Some of the characters are able to see visions of the past, which appear in-universe in sepia tones. Vickery 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.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The fate of Lexi and Amber's parents.
- Self-Made Orphan: The villain manipulates his psychic nieces into inflicting Psychic-Assisted Suicide on their parents, as a test of their abilities and to clear the way for him to become their guardian.
- Shout-Out: The nonsense phrase Vickery recites to resist interrogation is a line from the anti-interrogation earworm in The Demolished Man.
- Sympathetic Magic: The villains are able to magically locate Castine using a piece of fabric soaked with her blood, and later Vickery the same way. This method wouldn't work with most people, only on the few who have been altered by their experiences as Vickery and Castine have been.
- Twin Telepathy:
- 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 Assimilation Plot also involved a pair of twins (in that case, fraternal adult twins) with a psychic bond.
- Twincest: 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 Twin Telepathy left them feeling that they couldn't really connect to anyone else.
