More Walls Broken by Tim Powers
Wednesday, February 27, 2019 at 6:35AM 
Published by Subterranean Press on February 28, 2019
More Walls Broken is a short and sweet novella. It is to Tim Powers’ credit that he didn’t try to pad the story. The story has just enough substance to work as a novella but not enough to sustain a full-length novel.
Clive Cobb wants to get tenure. To that end, he’s been roped into helping two other professors in the Consciousness Research Department as they try to raise and capture the consciousness of their recently deceased department head. They want him to share knowledge that he took to the grave. Trapping his soul in a concoction of chocolate and rum (who could resist?) might not be the most ethical way of uncovering that information, which is one reason Cobb feels dicey about helping his colleagues.
The experiment goes awry when the deceased professor’s daughter appears. Did the dead professor’s soul transmigrate into his daughter? Transmigration of souls was one of the professor’s theories. Cobb has his doubts.
The mystery deepens when the professor’s daughter claims to have just left her father, who was very much alive. Perhaps she is not the person she appears to be.
The heart of the story examines the fork in a life, illustrating how one decision can have unintended and unexpected consequences that change not only our own lives, but the lives of others. It is both a story of regret and of second chances. It isn’t a complex or particularly deep story, but it doesn’t pretend to be. In its simplicity, however, it reveals simple truths about the need to live your best life in a way that doesn’t ruin other lives or produce uncorrectable regrets.
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