Three Days to Never: A Novel (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: gold swastika, remote viewers, Three Days, Tim Powers, Frank Marrity (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Powers (Declare) delivers another top-notch supernatural spy thriller. When Frank Marrity's grandmother dies unexpectedly during 1987's New Age Harmonic Convergence, his 12-year-old daughter, Daphne, steals a videotape from the old woman's Pasadena house that turns out to be a Chaplin film long believed lost. Before Daphne can finish watching the film, its powerful symbolism awakens a latent pyrokinetic ability in her that burns the tape. Frank later discovers letters that prove his grandmother was Albert Einstein's illegitimate daughter. This comes to the attention of a special branch of the Mossad specializing in the Kabbalah as well as a shadowy Gnostic sect interested in a potential weapon discovered by Einstein that he didn't offer to FDR during WWII—a weapon more terrible in its way than the atomic bomb. In typical Powers fashion, his characters' spiritual need to undo past sins or mistakes propels the ingenious plot, which manages to be intricate without becoming convoluted, to its highly satisfying conclusion. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

In 1990, Karen Joy Fowler published "Lieserl," a piquant and moving tribute to Albert Einstein's daughter, a woman largely neglected by history and, sad to say, the great scientist himself. As the story unfolds, the young Einstein, ensconced in a space-time bubble, receives a series of letters from his first wife, Mileva Maric, recounting Lieserl's birth, preschool years, adolescence and death. In the final scene, a quiet indictment of Einstein's passive parenting, the scientist imagines sketching a valentine and then writing his daughter's name within its borders: "He loved Lieserl. He cut the word in half, down the S with the stroke of his nail. The two halves of the heart opened and closed, beating against each other, faster and faster, like wings, until they split apart and vanished from his mind."

"Lieserl" is a tough act to follow, but in Three Days to Never Tim Powers has done so with brio, bravado and a salutary measure of lunacy. The author imagines Lieserl Einstein-Maric maturing into a New Age eccentric with a talent for elementary particle physics. Not only does this quantum-mechanical witch contribute to her father's most momentous discovery, a maschinchen ("little machine") capable of considerable metaphysical mischief -- traveling through time, tampering with the past -- she also single-handedly raises the two offspring of her ne'er-do-well son.

When the story begins, Lieserl's grandson is now a parent himself, and so Powers gives us a second father-daughter pairing: widower Frank Marrity -- the name is a variation on Maric -- and 12-year-old Daphne. Much of the novel's labyrinthine plot concerns Frank and Daphne's efforts to survive three deliriously eventful days in 1987, right after the Harmonic Convergence of hippie lore, when various political, religious and eschatological factions try to steal Einstein's maschinchen along with other components possessed by his hapless descendants.

Although I've never visited Powers's house, I wouldn't be surprised to find a strange vehicle in his basement, equine in appearance and festooned with brass knobs and crystalline levers, that allows him to travel among all known modalities of fiction. Three Days to Never is a beguiling genre omelet, a mélange of forms ranging from alternate history to science fiction, urban fantasy to occult cliffhanger, espionage adventure to Ross Macdonald-style Southern California hardboiled detective thriller.

This magical mystery tour de force offers up one MacGuffin after another. Consider the moldering, disembodied human head through which the Vespers cult receives broadcasts from the dead. Not to mention the VHS cassette of "A Woman of the Sea," a lost 1926 Josef von Sternberg film, produced and edited by Charlie Chaplin, that somehow augments the maschinchen's power. And then there's the famous, and famously missing, cement slab bearing Chaplin's handprints and footprints, which the actor once created in the Grauman's Chinese Theatre forecourt, likewise crucial to upgrading Einstein's bizarre device.

At first blush, Three Days to Never looks like the sort of fast-paced confection that reviewers routinely compare to roller-coaster rides, but Powers's novel is more like a ride on a roller coaster affixed to a centrifuge plummeting from the top of Mt. Shasta. Nearly every page introduces yet another crypto-supernatural trope: poltergeists, astral bodies, Aeons, dybbuks, holographic talismans, electronic Ouija boards, clairvoyance, pyrokinesis. Before too long I found myself saying, with apologies to my favorite physicist, "Surely you're joking, Mr. Powers!" And yet despite this surfeit of conceits, or perhaps because of it, the book won me over. With its exuberant genre-scrambling, to say nothing of its philosophical hijinks, low-jinks and nether-jinks, it's a postmodern work par excellence that will have you counting the days -- far more than three, alas -- until the next Tim Powers valentine appears.

Reviewed by James Morrow
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (August 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380976536
• ISBN-13: 978-0380976539
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #656,523 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #22 in

  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( P ) > Powers, Tim

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Importance of Making the Right Choice, September 3, 2006

By	J. Brian Watkins (San Dimas, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars God May Not Play Dice With the Universe, September 5, 2006

By	A Reader (Phoenix, AZ) - See all my reviews

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!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Satisfying Trip Through Powers Funhouse Universe, September 25, 2006

By	Theo Logos (Pittsburgh, PA) - See all my reviews

Tim Powers is the only living writer of speculative fiction who regularly excites my interest, so I had been eagerly anticipating reading his latest effort, `Three Days To Never'. While I agree with others who have stated that it is not among his strongest work, it still looms far above most of what currently passes for speculative fiction, and did not disappoint me. I consumed the book in a day, and it was a most satisfying experience.

Powers does a couple of things better than anyone else I know of working in his genre. The first is to accurately portray human character across its full range of possibilities. His protagonists are almost always flawed, sometimes deeply, and his villains sometimes show discomforting traces of goodness. While he strongly hints that there are absolutes of good and evil in his universe, his human characters always have a certain amount of moral ambiguity, and you sense that his heroes are never too far from crossing the line and falling to the estate of his most monstrous bad guys. In `Three Days To Never', Powers illustrates this more starkly than ever before by using the possibilities of a time travel plot to double one of his characters and use him as both hero and villain - showing the extremes of both nobility and depravity that can exist in all of us.

The other feat at which Powers excels is in creating a fascinating and consistent universe that encompasses nearly all of his writing. The world he writes of is a world we recognize as our own, yet tilted oddly askew - refocused through an eldritch lens and given an arcane, funhouse feel. It little matters which of his books you first enter through into his universe, whether it be the siege of Vienna in `The Drawing of the Dark', cruising with Caribbean pirates in `On Stranger Tides', playing high stakes poker in Vegas in `Last Call', or navigating the deadly cloak and dagger games of the cold war in `Declare' - the crazy logic of his mystical universe remains remarkably consistent, from the monstrous, inhuman powers that lay just outside the spectrum of our daily lives that are summoned with Kabalistic magicks, to the madhouse, anti-logic of his ghosts who hover near us in an obscene caricature of the living world. It is the aura imparted by this peculiar universe which gives all of his work a unique stamp, much like Keith Richards' guitar work does for Rolling Stones songs. `Three Days To Never' is no exception to this rule. If entering the Powers universe sends chilling thrills through you as it does me, you will not be disappointed by this latest of his works.

This book does have its flaws. The connections to Einstein and Chaplin are more forced than are the historical allusions in his other works, and the details of his arcane science are sometimes, well, too detailed. The ending, also, is not as satisfying as it could have been (though consistent with his style), yet when the journey is as much fun as Powers makes it here, I wont quibble about the destination. This book should not be your introduction to Tim Powers (for that see `Last Call'), but if you are already a fan, it should not disappoint you.

Theo Logos