Three Days To Never [Mass Market Paperback]

I find nothing quite so thought provoking as a good time-travel story and Three Days to Never ranks among the best I've encountered. It is presented in a mystery/thriller format but with the intriguing twist that paranormal phenomena have been as well developed as more recognizable physics; such as relativity. Instead of Men in Black running around hiding alien technology we have shadowy secret agents using psychics the way the NSA uses computers. A nice wrinkle.

My pet peeve with mysteries is that an author is often either so cryptic that you never really figure out what was going on or presents a story so transparent that you have it figured out half way through. Powers succeeds at bringing the reader forward at just the right pace and at building a solid and satisfying moral conclusion that makes you think after you have finished the story.

What happens when the past can be changed? Should the past be tampered with? This story presents a classic time-travel theme; a causality violation, which is the fancy term (I think) for what happens if you go back in time and shoot yourself or a direct ancestor--thereby making your own existence impossible. Powers takes an interesting angle on the problem; drawing from Einstein and following recent scientific speculation he simply adds a dimension to our current understanding.

But perhaps the best aspect of this story is its treatment of the question of free will--can we ever make up for poor choices? Ends justify the means? Is it ever possible to remove someone from the world completely? Do private choices have public effects? If you could go back and talk to your younger self and know that bad choices will have a terrible effect on a future you is it wise to try?

Having just finished this book, I'm still sorting out the ideas presented, but regardless--it was well written and I look forward to reading more of Mr. Powers work.

But in Three Days to Never, men will try. (Modest spoilers here.)

It is near lunacy, or at least a sure road to regret, to attempt to review a Tim Powers book too soon after reading it, but here goes anyway. Fortunately, with Amazon, one doesn't need a time machine -- just the edit button. I cannot quite say why I liked Declare and Last Call much more than I liked Earthquake Weather or Expiration Date. Nor can I exactly put my finger on why I thought Three Days is more like the latter and not like the former. I suppose it's the superficial similarities to the last two installments of the Last Call Trilogy -- freaky astral projecting weirdos with crazy artifacts and devices chasing the good guys through SoCal to capture the essence of long-dead luminaries.

Digging more deeply, I think what I loved about Declare was that Powers perfectly balanced his story with his attempt to fit historical events into a new puzzle. And similarly, the supernatural elements seemed in Declare (as in Last Call) to compliment the rest of the goings on, not overwhelm them. I think I think that neither is true in Three Days. The attempt to bend the story around the true details of Einstein's existence (and some unexplained Charlie Chaplin events) seems almost forced and not natural. And the supernatural crazies become overwhelming by the end.

I believe that those with a good working knowledge of Shakespear's the Tempest or the biographical details of Einstein's life will appreciate this novel a bit more than I did. Then again, I knew very little about the Wasteland or Kim Philby's life, but still adored, respectively, Last Call and Declare. The book also suffers from one of the problems that I think no time-travel novel can avoid. It either will generally have holes that don't make logical sense, or it will make logical sense but spend considerable effort on side-points explaining why the time travel scenarios are consistent with the framework the novel has constructed. Three Days suffers a bit from the latter problem.

So with some of that negativity out of the way, there are things in this book to celebrate. There are, as in most of Powers' works, moments of devastating revelation. If you're used to the rhythms of his novels and his compulsion to force you into active reading, you will not be disappointed. (As an aside, there is a nice moment in this book where one of the characters who herself must rely on the eyes of others to see has thoughts about what makes a good reader and what makes a bad -- it is an interesting little insight into Powers' story-telling style.) And his masterful manipulation of familiar themes is at times genius, as is his dialogue. There is one running gag throughout the book that is virtually worth the price of admission itself -- when two members of one of the weird factions have conversations over the radio, they give each other signals (code words based on popular music or children's cereals) when to turn the channel to avoid detection. Much hilarity ensues.

In any event, Powers fans will not be diappointed and likely will spend at least one morning with bloodshot eyes. Enjoy!

Tim Powers is a master of the 'Secret History' fantasy, a form where famous people have motivations, and famous events occur for reasons, having to do with magic and the occult instead of the normal, every-day reasons that we know of and believe. He researches these people and events meticulously, so that his secret history meshes seamlessly with actual events. Therefore, when Powers succeeds in snatching you into his "What-If" premise, our real history is never violated, and it is simply loads of great fun. His last five books have been set in the 20th Century. I found the first three to be sterile reads. A tsunami of magical events and effects, to be sure, but very cold stuff. With 'Declare' and even more so with this book 'Three Days To Never', Mr. Powers has weaved mysticism in with his magic, giving a sense of the religious to it all that is flatly missinig from all his prior books. In 'Three Days To Never', I think Mr. Powers also gives us main characters - teenager Daphne and her father, Frank - that we can finally CARE about deeply, and that is the topper.

I'm recommending both books highly, 'Declare' and 'Three Days To Never'. The magic in both books is not a tired old hashing of all his prior magical constructs, and that is greatly refreshing. There's new magic here in this time travel novel. What happens when you travel through time and arrive at your destination via a quantum mechanics-probability wave mechanism? It's VERY startling, even horrifying. Mr. Powers continues to develop concepts around 'ghosts' that can be disturbing and perhaps even terrifying.

The motivations of many characters develop throughout the book. I was quite often surprised! Surprised in ways that made sense for each character.

The secret history conceit of 'Three Days To Never' is primarily concerned with Albert Einstein. We all know about his brilliant discoveries concerning space and time, and quantum mechanics. In our normal history, Mr. Einstein burned out in the early 1920's and did not produce much of note thereafter. The conceit here is: What if he didn't burn out? What if he then made bold, stunning, later discoveries, but they were so dangerous and frightening that he hid them? And only now, in our modern day, has the mystery of these discoveries come to light. The protagonists, Daphne and Frank, have very compelling reasons for needing to solve the mystery; and there are other factions with very intense interest in wanting to solve the mystery themselves, and gain what fruit may be gained from the solution. It's a great thriller, a great ride.

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