The Gold Bug Variations is unique in contemporary metafiction. It deals less with questions of simultaneity than Powers's two earlier novels did and, although it depends upon flashbacks to the 1950's for the development of the narration, it is more sequential than such works of contemporary fiction as, for example, Ursula Le Guin's Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990; see separate entry) or much of Thomas Pynchon's writing (see separate enties).

Powers's debt to Edgar Allan Poe is amply acknowledged simply by the title he has chosen for his book, but this debt is minimal and his titular acknowledgement is cryptic more than revealing.

Certainly this novel does not imitate Poe; rather it uses him as one of his two most important points of departure. More important than Powers's literary predecessors in this context are his musical and scientific predecessors, notably Bach, Watson, and Crick. He...