William Ashbless

Ashbless was invented by Powers and Blaylock when they were students at California State University, Fullerton in the early 1970s, originally as a reaction to the low quality of the poetry being published in the school magazine. They invented nonsensical free verse poetry and submitted it to the paper in Ashbless's name, where it was reportedly enthusiastically accepted.

Ashbless is, however, best known in his incarnation as a 19th-century poet, in which guise he appears in Powers' The Anubis Gates (1983) and as a lesser character in Blaylock's The Digging Leviathan (1984). Neither author was aware that the other's novel contained a William Ashbless until the coincidence was noticed by the editor responsible for both books, who suggested that the two consult one another so that their references would be consistent. Ashbless also features (as Sir William Ashbless) in Powers' 1979 novel The Drawing of the Dark, credited with a brief quote before the book's prologue: In his 1992 novel Last Call, Tim Powers includes a poem attributed to William Ashbless in the introduction to Book One. The poem is "from" a later time period, as it mentions airplanes, cars, and blue jeans. Powers' novel On Stranger Tides opens with an excerpt from a poem by William Ashbless, implying that the novel's name is in reference to the poem:

In 2017, Big Hit Entertainment, the label behind K-Pop group BTS, created a blog post on Naver that mentions Ashbless as a character. The blog post tells the fictional story of Ashbless as a 16th-century poet and playing card enthusiast who created a special card known as The Flower. The blog adds details to Ashbless' life in order to flesh out the narrative surrounding some of BTS' concepts. The post was deleted and then re-uploaded in 2018 to further support themes of time travel in BTS' fictional universe.