After Many a Summer, a magisterial new novella from Tim Powers, borrows its title from a line in Tennyson's famous poem "Tithonus." An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting ...

After Many a Summer is unremarkable. It's very short, so none of us really minded reading it, and there's nothing really terrible about it. The writing is fine. The premise is clear. The plot moves. It's just that we didn't understand at all why it was written. The novella is basically a single scene about a mystical object that predicts the future and the collision of people who want to control it, but it's not really clear why any of it matters. Is this a statement about the shortsightedness of Hollywood or rich people? Is it something about not wanting to know the future? Why do we have the drunk at the center? What's with the time looping at the end? I wish we had more to say here, but we honestly all just shrugged when it was over and forgot it. If you're waiting in a doctor's office and you see After Many a Summer on the table, read it -- it's fast and it's not a painful way to spend time. But that's about as strong as a recommendation as we can give.