Anubi's Time Portals

For this week, I read the book The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. I found the story’s concept very interesting; it combined Egyptian mythology and time travel to create an adventure that could decide the future of the world. Most of the sci-fi stories that have time traveling mainly uses time machines, wormholes, or any other thing where the source come from science and space. However, in this book the author used the concept of myths and magic to create time portals. These were originally for summoning the Egyptian gods from the past when they were in their prime but failed. Even though the story mainly has fictional situations and events based on time traveling and Egyptian myth, it also seemed to have some connection with real historical events to give a more accurate feeling to the setting. The story has many interesting characters, each with their own goal. Though the main protagonist, Brendan Doyle, happened to join the expedition to the past in order to meet and study an enigmatic poet he has been interested in researching. However, he ended up getting on all sorts of problems. Out of the various antagonist, only three of the main ones stood out to me: Horrabin the evil clown, Dog-Face Joe, and Doctor Romanelli. Horrabin was a villainous clown on stilts that commanded over beggars and conducted experiments on people. When the experiments failed, the people would turn into monsters and be locked in the clown’s basement. I think that this enemy has inspired many of the evil clowns we know today. Another villain is Dog-Face Joe, the body swapping pseudo-werewolf, who also happened to be one of the magicians that participated in the activation of Anubis Gate to summon the gods. However, after failing he got cursed and was transformed into a furry canid human with the powers to swap bodies; he even managed to place Doyle’s soul in the body of the enigmatic poet he had been researching on, William Ashbless. Additionally, Dog-Face Joe’s character served as a personification of the Egyptian god Anubis, which fit the story. Finally the main antagonist, Doctor Romanelli was a powerful magician who had been trying to smite the English invaders from Egypt. At the beginning of the story, Doctor Romanelli had a doll with a very similar name to the original, acting as his double. The real one was not involved until later on in the story. It really interested me in the story when Doyle and Romanelli ended up in the Egyptian underworld. It was ironic how the antagonist wanted to call the Gods to smite the invaders, but ended up getting devoured by the demonic chaos serpent, Apophis, while the protagonist got to hitch a ride on Ra’s sunboat.