Three Days to Never: A Novel by Tim Powers

by Tim Powers

Albert Einstein's groundbreaking scientific discoveries made possible the creation of the most terrible weapon the world had ever known. But he made another discovery that he chose to reveal to no one—to keep from human hands a power that dwarfed the atomic bomb.When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure from her recently deceased grandmother's house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank, realize what they now have in their possession. In an instant they are thrust into the center of a world-altering conspiracy, drawing the dangerous attentions of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists. Now father and daughter have three days to learn the rules of a terrifying magical chess game in order to escape a fate more profound than death—because the Marritys hold the key to the ultimate destruction of not only what's to come . . . but what already has been.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Thriller, Speculative Fiction, Alternate History

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Timothy Thomas Powers is an American science fiction and fantasy author. Powers has won the World Fantasy Award twice for his critically acclaimed novels Last Call and Declare.

Most of Powers's novels are "secret histories": he uses actual, documented historical events featuring famous people, but shows another view of them in which occult or supernatural factors heavily influence the motivations and actions of the characters.


Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, and grew up in California, where his Roman Catholic family moved in 1959.

He studied English Literature at Cal State Fullerton, where he first met James Blaylock and K.W. Jeter, both of whom remained close friends and occasional collaborators; the trio have half-seriously referred to themselves as "steampunks" in contrast to the prevailing cyberpunk genre of the 1980s. Powers and Blaylock invented the poet William Ashbless while they were at Cal State Fullerton.

Another friend Powers first met during this period was noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick; the character named "David" in Dick's novel VALIS is based on Powers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner) is dedicated to him.

Powers's first major novel was The Drawing of the Dark (1979), but the novel that earned him wide praise was The Anubis Gates, which won the Philip K. Dick Award, and has since been published in many other languages.

Powers also teaches part-time in his role as Writer in Residence for the Orange County High School of the Arts where his friend, Blaylock, is Director of the Creative Writing Department. Powers and his wife, Serena, currently live in Muscoy, California. He has frequently served as a mentor author as part of the Clarion science fiction/fantasy writer's workshop.

He also taught part time at the University of Redlands.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Kemper · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this is one of those books that I really wanted to love but to my great disappointment ended up being just OK. It’s got Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, time travel, ghosts, psychic links, astral projection, Israeli spies and a secret evil organization. So what’s not to love?

In its defense I’ll admit that I probably wasn’t in a good frame of mind for something like this. I’ve been distracted by a couple of things, and it’s that glorious time of year where for 10 days in the spring and fall I can go outside without either freezing to death or collapsing from heat exhaustion.

All of which is just to say that I had a really hard time sitting down and focusing on this and this is the kind of story that demands and rewards focus. Maybe if it’d been a bit more engaging I would have found the groove and got into it more, or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood. Probably a bit of both.

Anyhow, I did enjoy the whole idea of Albert Einstein’s secret discoveries being hunted by opposing sides that use a mix of the occult and weird science, but I would have liked more of that and less of the story of Frank Marrity and his daughter getting caught in the crossfire.

Unique with a lot of nifty ideas, but it just didn’t knock my socks off.

[Lightreads · Rating 3 out of 5]

. First I'm going to rave about how shiny awesome this book is, and then I'm going to have a bit of a screaming rant and kick it repeatedly until it stops whimpering. Okay? Okay.

So this book is awesome! It's a whacky weird skiffy thriller about a father and daughter, and family secrets, and time travel, and Einstein, and ESP, and Israel, and just, stuff. Wildly creative and totally absorbing, with some funny tucked in around the edges. And it's not perfect – the thematic movement about determinism and choice doesn't quite come together in the end – but you know, it was just so much fun.

This book also made me so angry, I'm about to try and tell you but I already know I really can't. See, there's a character who does a series of morally despicable things, and who at one point literally begs to be erased from the timeline so she never would have existed, because, wait for it, she would rather never have existed than be blind.

I am so fucking sick of this, I am choking on it. It's not that this doesn't happen to people who acquire disabilities, it's that this sort of characterization is the default assumption of literature. And this narrative in particular validates her in a number of implicit ways, even while it hands her an abortive sort of redemption story. And I just. I can't even!

It's not that it doesn't happen, like I said. Actually, when I finished this book I went back and read some of my journal entries from three years ago, right after I lost my eye. I wanted to remind myself just how bad it was, and yeah, I was a huddle of feral, shaking black terror for months. But I'm not anymore. And here's the thing that's really lit my fuse.

The dominant narrative construction of acquired disability – in literature as derived from general social life – is of heroism, and I am telling you right now that it is bullshit. The person who acquires a disability and who copes and goes on with life isn't heroic; the person who acquires a disability and fails to cope is a failure. A failure of ingenuity, of thoughtfulness, of curiosity, of adaptability. I get this all the time from random people on the train who are all, "I couldn't live like you do, you're so brave!" And I'm like, okay, first of all, contrary to your lovely implication there, my life is a close relation to fucking awesome. And secondly, yes you could. That's what we do, we deal. And thirdly, stop othering me, because when you turn me into a hero you're making sure you don't ever really have to deal with the fact that I'm just like you, and what happened to me could happen to anyone. I am, and it could, so pull up your big girl pants and deal with it.

This book didn't, at all, and it is a measure of how otherwise crazy cool it is that it's getting three stars out of me.

[Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

It definitely is full of the who's who of cabals, famous personages, Time Travel, and just enough quirky psi and technological hijinks to want me to catapult this novel to one of those must-read realms of creative SF.

I mean, what does Einstein and Charlie Chaplin have in common with time-travel that mimics the trajectory of a swastika? Or a novel that attempts to do the same in it's plot progression? Theoretically, these are some damn cool villains.

The opening is solid and grounded, and even all of the Shakespeare quotations make perfect sense as a means to focus oneself in a timeline. It's cool!

So why didn't I love this?

I think it's probably the characters. I kept losing my "care" focus.

The family stuff was interesting in retrospect, especially when some of that family isn't family but is yourself at a different age or across an erased timeline or as a sacrifice to a better timeline that turned on itself to bite you, your progeny, or your friends on your ass. I love the fact that it got really wacky and strange. Truly.

But it also took it so far away from my love of the characters that I started going glassy-eyed. Especially when the ghosts came into play. Or the sex changes. Or the ragged bursts of time travel and reattachments of lifelines on a revolving helix of galaxies.

Or something like that.

Just how many Mary-s WERE there? Yikes.

At least when Heinlein did it, he spread out the weirdness over many books in small doses and grounded fully in good stories. :) Let's do an all-out 4th dimensional viewpoint romp, shall we? It's impressive, but it's even a bit too much for me! Whoa. :)

Maybe it's just me. I also don't like it when authors don't do ENOUGH of the weird stuff. :) Maybe I'm just impossible to please. :)

[Theo Logos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim 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. He strongly hints that there are absolutes of good and evil in his universe, but his characters always have a certain amount of moral ambiguity — 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 our own, yet tilted oddly askew - refocused through an eldritch. His occult, hidden histories lie beneath what we think we know of our world, reshaping everything into sinister shapes. 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, summoned with Kabalistic-like 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 does have its flaws. The connections to Einstein and Chaplin are more forced than are the historical allusions in his other hidden histories, 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.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do love Tim Powers' writing. THREE DAYS TO NEVER marks me catching up completely, and finishing reading all of his novels, and they've all been brilliant in their own way. A couple haven't quite grabbed me as much as others, but this one has time travel, remote sensing, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and a great cast of characters tightly bound in an intricate plot. I was hooked from the start.

I've been away for two days in Powers' head,, held by his way of taking a weird idea, such as Einstien inventing a time machine, then filtering it through a world view that contains ghosts, ESP and all manner of psychic phenomena. Anybody who has read Powers in recent years knows all his tics and enthusiasms, and they're here in full, but this is tighter, more controlled than the frenzy of, say, Earthquake Weather, and all the better for it.

There are moments of briliance here too, in descriptions of how a blind woman can live by seeing through others' eyes, of swooping travels in the astral planes, and a climactic sequence as tense as any thriller.

But at heart, it's a story of a broken family, working together for each other against heavy odds, and it's often rather touching and tender. And funny too, with a comedic touch that's sometimes absent from Powers' books.

I'm sorry I took so long getting to this one.

It's another winner.

And I'm also sorry that there's no more new Powers books for me to read now. I'll be waiting impatiently for his next one.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plot-centric sci fi/fantasy novel about spies trying to find a time machine invented by Albert Einstein. Some fun ideas, but not much character development. The story lagged in the middle, when it turned into a big, long chase scene. Editing out about 100 pages could've made the plot better. An OK read, but not great.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always find Tim Powers's books brilliant, but I'll confess that I like best the ones concerning time periods or subjects that interest me most. For this reason, his Declare, which immediately preceded Three Days. . .and dealt with Cold War espionage (as well as more arcane matters), interested me less than, for example, The Stress of Her Regard, about the Romantic poets and their muse, not because it was necessarily a worse book. Three Days to Never lacks the mythic resonance of Stress. . ., and my favorite Powers book Last Call, but it has deeply engaging characters, and poses intriguing (and sometimes heart-breaking) questions about the relation between present and past. It is set in 1987, in the time of the Harmonic Convergence, when Frank Marrity's grandmother, who raised him, dies after making an impossible phone call to tell him she burned down her shed (she didn't). When he and his twelve year old daughter go to investigate, she finds a videotape supposedly of Peewee's Big Adventure (it isn't), which is actually the key to a mystery coveted by the Israeli Secret Service and a European order of occultists. This novel uses science fictional precepts in a fantastical fashion and, in typical Powers fashion, brings in historical figures (Einstein, Charlie Chaplin) and literary references (the Tempest) to make the fantasy seem real. I'll admit, my attention lagged when the narrative switched away from the Marritys, particularly at the beginning, in part because the emotional and psychic bonds between father and daughter are portrayed so well. If you're looking for an intellectually stimulating, sci fi/fantasy/thriller hybrid, give Three Days to Never a shot.

[Tatiana Shorokhova · Rating 2 out of 5]

Безумно увлекательный синопсис, но ужасное исполнение. Книге явно не хватало хорошего редактора - всю линию моссадовцев можно было смело сокращать, потому что развитию сюжета это не дало ровным счётом ничего.

Мне просто нужно написать, как мучительно я дочитывала этот роман, потому что наивно надеялась на какой-то взрывной финал. Нет. Надо было смело бросать на 50-й странице.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Tim Powers novels go, "Three Days to Never" is a lackluster effort. For anyone else, this is a pretty entertaining novel.

For me, here Powers mines what these days has become his usual formula -- twists on souls, espionage, alternate history, people using unusual powers, fantastic explanations for ordinary events -- and, well, finds it pretty much tapped out. In "Three Days to Never" EVERYONE has amazing abilities, not everything is adequately explained, and the competing groups (I won't even begin to try to explain what's going on) aren't sufficiently different to keep confusion at bay. There are portions of the novel that I'm still not sure I understand.

That said, it's not a bad book at all. If I weren't such a huge fan of Powers' work, I wouldn't complain as much.

My plea to Powers is to give this formula a rest for a little bit and go back to the comparatively simpler pleasures of "Anubis Gates," "The Stress of Her Regard," "On Stranger Tides" and even "Last Call," in which he used his current approach best. My plea to novice Powers readers: Do not, under any circumstances, make this your first Powers book.

[Greg Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a masterpiece.
If you like action, adventure, time travel and a lot of really weird stuff thrown in, this is the book for you.
Interesting concepts with compelling characters at every turn.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three Days to Never is about... well, it's complicated. Basically, it starts with Albert Einstein's unacknowledged great-grandchildren, and the time machine in their grandmother's shed. Or something like that. It starts with a rock in the desert that used to bear an inscription, and Charlie Chaplin's handprints in wet concrete. No... it starts with Frank and Daphne Marrity, a widowed father and his daughter living near San Bernardino, and with a VHS copy of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. No, that's not it either. It starts with a half-dead head in a box, chattering directions to the driver of an anonymous white van, and with an NSA agent who actually works for Israel's Mossad. No, it... well, it's complicated.

Three Days to Never is undoubtedly a challenging book to read and follow. That's what happens when you start messing around with time and space, with spacetime convincingly considered as a single navigable plenum. Things get complicated. The book contains the most realistic and vivid evocation I've yet run across concerning the nature of time, and how one might rise above our mundane experience of duration in order to see the totality of spacetime as a single entity. In that way, and despite other elements, this novel is almost science fiction. But that's only a part of the book's furniture. Other elements flatly contradict its hard-science aspects. It's got ghosts in it, too, and bilocation, and Kabbalah, and a Rubik's Cube with Hebrew letters on the faces of each cube, and... the novel would probably fly away into a dozen different pieces, if it weren't held together by Frank and Daphne, strong central characters whose love for each other binds them more closely than would be possible in a non-magical world.

What Powers has crafted here is an intensely cerebral thriller. While there are plenty of gunshots and car chases, the engine of the plot is a vast and intellectual conspiracy whose ultimate goal is to take control of everything, past, present and future—to retroactively have made its own success inevitable. The players are many, and their methods are exceedingly subtle—does that newspaper, folded just that way and held at that particular angle, mean the coast is clear, or is it a signal to run out the back door?

What Three Days to Never is really about... is complicated.

We're not quite talking perfection here. I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't just read Powers' more recent collection The Bible Repairman, but here again Powers indulges in an oddly fervent recitation of tobacco-friendly motifs. Cigarettes—smoked publicly, even in front of children—were still a common sight in this book's primary eras, but apparently they can also repel ghosts. I'm not sure whether Powers himself is directly aware of just how much space he gives to cigarettes, cigarette butts, matches and lighters, pipes and pipe tobacco, throughout the pages of this book. From a 21st-century perspective, though, the constant smog does seem a little excessive.

On the whole, though, this is exactly the sort of brilliant work I look for in a Powers novel. I would love to see this book made into a film, too, if it could be done without compromising the nonlinear canvas and the magical elements that make this book more than just a mundane thriller. It wouldn't be easy to do right, at all—portraying the multiple changes in point of view on film would be an incredible challenge. Christopher Nolan, the guy who directed Memento and Inception, could probably manage it, but I'm not sure that any Hollywood director would have both the clout and the desire to do justice to Three Days to Never.

So I recommend you just incorporate the written work into your worldline. If you're anything like me, you will have been glad you did.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been sitting in my unread book pile of shame so long (2015!) I had absolutely no idea what it was about when I started reading. Now I'm trying to think of the best way to describe it without going into spoilers.

It follows twelve year old Daphne and her father Frank as they attempt to unravel the history of his grandmother after her death. There are a few different threads that start off completely disparate before weaving together into a satisfying narrative. There's enough of a mystery at the start to entice the reader to keep going and it's definitely worth it.

It has a great mix of humour, drama and mystery. I'd definitely recommend anyone interested in a weird science fiction mystery.

[Melissa McShane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my second read of the book and I still can't bring myself to give it five stars. Objectively, everything that makes a Tim Powers novel great is here; I just didn't warm to it the way I did Last Call or Declare. Powers mixes the films of Charlie Chaplin with the physics of Albert Einstein and comes up with an excellent novel about time travel and all the anomalies it can generate.

As usual, I was captivated by the sheer weirdness of the elements of the plot--golden swastikas powering a magical machine, for example, or a lost Charlie Chaplin movie of such great symbolism it can physically overwhelm a viewer (embedded in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, of all things). And there's a great three-point structure here of good guys, bad guys, and good-guys-opposed-to-the-other-good-guys that I think makes for a strong plot. I really loved the blind woman, Charlotte, who uses her remote viewing ability to see through nearby people's eyes; Powers explores aspects of this peculiar talent that never occurred to me and then doesn't restore her vision at the end, when the timeline is altered. There's a lot of really great stuff going on here.

I think what doesn't quite work for me is that there are so many disparate elements that it's not as tightly woven as Powers' best work is. There's the main story (time travel and the machine that makes it happen, though that "machine" is really really clever) but there's also remote viewing and a head in a box and ghosts that seem to draw from Expiration Date and blood magic, and it's just a little too much. It's still Tim Powers, so it's excellent, but I'm not attached to it.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I finished it to make sure that Charlotte, Frank, and Daphne came out okay, but overall it was freaking confusing. I'm not sure what the movie had to do with anything (Chaplin seemed only tangentially related in the end, and Matt didn't signify at all), I couldn't keep the characters straight, new bad guy characters showed up in the last 100 or so pages... Where did Canino come from?

I wouldn't be surprised if the interconnectedness of it all was more profound than I could absorb. By three-fourths of the way in I was too weary to attempt to understand it.

[Haroudo Xavier · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really do like Tim Powers. Have read most of his book and enjoyed them deeply. The weird, occult-like thriller and the making up of his own mythology on the get go, create really compelling books.

But I´m a bit disappointed. I can´t say I disliked Three Days to Never, but is somewhat "formulaic", compared to his other books and not near as deep or emotional as Declare. The distinct research on Declare or on The Stress of Her Regard also didn´t seen evident on Three Days to Never and the usual mixing of real history with his own machinations felt forced.

By two thirds of the book to the end, things started feel rushed: the plot took a downturn to over overexposition and unfinished threads, characters which seemed interesting didn´t pay off at all, and the whole build up of a great world building suddenly fell flat.

He is still one of the best writers of weird, science fiction, fantastique and fantasy literature we have at the moment, bending all genres together and creating something truly wonderful. Problem is, after you reach such a high point with so many great books, it gets harder to beat yourself.

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Powers' Three Days to Never is a fantasy/sci-fi novel set in California in 1987, at the time of the Harmonic Convergence. It's a tale of time travel, conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and secrets--secret inventions, secret family relations, secret government and religious groups.

The novel opens with the mysterious death of Lisa Marrity on Mount Shasta. Just before her death, she calls her grandson Frank Marrity and tells him she has burned down the shed behind her house. Worried, Frank and his daughter Daphne go to check on the old woman and her home. The shed has not burned down, though it was clearly meant to, and Frank and Daphne, in their explorations of the shed, discover several artifacts of interest (Charlie Chaplin's handprints from in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, letters from Albert Einstein to Lisa Marrity, and a videotape that is labelled Pee-Wee's Big Adventure but, upon viewing, is actually a lost--and very disturbing and powerful--Chaplin film). Immediately after their removal of these items, rival groups close in on the father and daughter, each group trying to retrieve these various elements and recreate a lost invention of Einstein's: a time machine. In the process, the novel includes telepathic communication, time travel, out-of-body experiences, ghosts, dybbuks, explorations of alternate histories, and, of course, car chases and shoot-outs. This is all good stuff. I mean, you can't go wrong with time travel, attempted murder, and conspiracy theories, right?

Wrong.

In general, Three Days to Never is a good book. It's entertaining and certainly has a lot to keep the reader interested. But, although the jacket copy claims that this "is an exhilarating masterwork of speculative suspense," it ultimately falls short of being a masterwork (though it is frequently exhilarating and suspenseful) because the plentiful plot devices and multitude of characters overshadow the book's true potential.

Tim Powers provides the reader with lots of characters to keep track of, all of whom have a backstory. Mostly, this is a good thing. The characters are interesting, both individually and in combination, and this creates a nicely complex tapestry of interests and motivations to help drive the plot forward. But after 300-400 pages, trying to keep track of all the characters and their backstories becomes a bit tiring. Furthermore, most characters don't develop much past their initial backstory. There are intriguing hints of what has led characters to be who they are or glimpses of even more interesting bits of their history, but there is not enough of this. Powers has had to sacrifice depth of character for breadth of coverage.

Even worse, by the end of the novel, as a result of the multiple narratives that have been introduced, Powers seems to be left with little choice but to focus on wrapping up the various plots while shortchanging the more interesting thematic elements that have been briefly raised throughout.

The book is most interesting, not in its intricate plot development or suspenseful unfolding of connections, but in its exploration of larger themes: How do we deal with regret for past actions? What are the consequences of changing the past? How will we--and the larger world--be changed? Can we really know which timeline, which choices, are best for us? More important, how much choice do any of us really have? And finally, what obligation do we have toward our family, toward the past, toward the future?

One character in the novel says to Frank, "Choices! You don't get choices, you get . . . situations that you react to--the actual cumulative you reacts, with whatever half-ass wiring you've got at the time, not some hovering "soul." You're a mercury switch--if the spring tilts you to the right degree, you complete a circuit, and if it's got metal fatigue, it tilts you less, and you don't. You don't have free will, sonny. . . . If a scientist could know every last detail of your physiology and life experiences, he could predict with absolute accuracy every "choice" you'd make in any moral quandary" (356).

At its best, when at its closest to being a masterwork, Three Days to Never is an attempt to deal with this statement and the questions it raises. More often, the novel is a thriller (a good thriller, to be sure--I don't want to undersell it), but only a thriller. It's a thriller with pretensions to greatness. It gestures toward such fascinating questions and I had high hopes that this would be a novel that manages to be both a pageturner and a head-scratcher. In the end, though, the balance skews to plot over theme and Three Days to Never becomes more thriller than thinker.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope that the trade vagaries that resulted in his latest novel being reasonably well distributed in India (this is the first of his novels I have bought here first-hand and within a year of publication - that I then waited an additional two years to read it is another matter) continue to hold good for Tim Powers' future novels. They're just that good. While his earlier novels are more diverse, he's been focusing on fast-paced thrillers that take some chunk of recorded recent history, re-interpret it in the light of wild occult theories and Powers' own unique approach to practical magic and result in what people call 'secret histories'. All this would be so much dry arcana without Powers' knack for creating flawed, credible and appealing characters and his gift for vivid, relentless narrative and tight plotting.

'3 Days To Never' is based on the concept that the nuclear bomb was not Einstein's most horrific brainchild; that he had delved into kabbalic esoterica and developed a device or technique that could, at different levels of application, allow you to erase an individual from the world's history, to travel through time, and at the highest level, to be mentally aware of all time and space at once; to be like a god. Einstein hid these secrets well. Rival secret societies - an obscure branch of the Mossad and a group of European occultists - are on the lookout for them.

When Frank Marrity and his daughter travel to Frank's grandmother's house in response to a very strange phone call in which the grandmother claims to have burned down a ramshackle old outhouse, they discover a long-lost paving slab with Charlie Chaplin's hand and footprints on it, a box of letters written by Albert Einstein and catch a glimpse of gold buried beneath the floorboards of the shed, which is still intact. Grandmother, however, is not - she was mysteriously found dying quite far from home minutes after she must have made the call to Frank.

Frank and his daughter soon find themselves in the midst of a vastly complicated game of spy vs. spy, as each side tries to get information out of them. The plot is complex - really too complex to keep track of at times. But Powers' narration, always grounded in his main characters' experience and impressions is what kept me locked in for the duration. As did the cast of variously noble, cantankerous, tragic or downright twisted characters - Powers has a particularly good line in villains, as usual. As in any time travel novel, there is at least one time-travelling character present. I won't reveal the time-traveller's identity, but it has startling consequences for one of the main characters, and makes at least part of the novel about who we are, who we might become, and how the choices we make, along with an element of pure chance, could some day make us unrecognisable to ourselves.

There was much more I wanted to touch on about this novel - the use of quotations from 'The Tempest' that make the story sometimes seem to parallel Shakespeare's play and add so much resonance to it all, the business with Charlie Chaplin, the supremely creepy Baphomet head, several other characters, but that would result in one of those reviews that wind up being a needlessly detailed plot-summary with a few appreciative gurgles tacked on. Instead, I'll end by saying that concepts like 'slipstream' tend to be bandied - and practiced - as if they were esoteric, ultra-hip and difficult disciplines. It takes a master like Powers to use the idea of melding together disparate genres to create gripping entertainment with both head and heart.

[Sandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Powers is not an easy author to read. It took me two tries to get through Declare because it was so densely packed action and ideas. It required way too much brain power the first time I tried to read it. The Anubis Gates was convoluted and required a bit of knowledge about English Literature (thank goodness I majored) and Egyptian mythology (limited, at best). Both were very good, but required a lot of work out of the reader.

With Three Days to Never, Powers manages to make his fantastically bizarre plot accessible and easy to read. Yeah! It's every bit as creative and weird as Declare and The Anubis Gates, but it's comprehensible without a lot of paging back. I think it's an excellent first choice for someone who is curious about Tim Powers work.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frank receives a strange phone call from his grandmother in Pasadena. An hour later she is found 600 miles away. Dead. Frank and his daughter want to know how and why. So does Israeli intelligence. So does an ancient cult. And how does Charlie Chaplin fit into the picture? Oh, and did I mention time travel?

This book combines supernatural, science fiction, and spy genres. I thought the combination was deftly handled, but the book might be a bit too densely packed for some readers.

The main characters are an English lit prof and his twelve year old daughter. I'm a bit tired of the "perfect human" main character so I really appreciate the ordinariness of these people. Also the setting in a realistic 1987 Southern California wins it points for me.

The meat of the book is how individuals deal with a chance to change their past, destroying the present for a possibly better one. There is a host of different motives, power, nationalism, family, and more. What would you do? Amusingly, the one character who manages to time travel with standard money making schemes (invest in Microsoft) is generally ignored by everyone else.

Discovering this book is why I slog through mediocre sf books. (I still don't know why I slog through mediocre fantasy books.)

[Coleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

***Zero Spoilers***

I picked this up because it promised to have a bit of time travel in it. It ended up having a bit of everything in it.

One and a half acts into this book I had no idea what was going on. I didn't like it. There was just too much happening for me to follow. That, plus with so many supernatural things spinning about, I had a hard time understanding the ground on which the book stood. I considered giving up numerous times but something told me to wait and that it was all about to come together for me.

Well it did. This book fell into place and it did in an amazing way. I wouldn't call it "hard science fiction" but I might call it "hard supernatural".

Tim Powers has an imagination that won't stop and he can write really well too! It's a book that a guy like me can't give less than five stars. Wonderfully inventive, beautiful sentences, incredibly interesting characters and a story that will blow your socks off.

Most people probably won't be confused for as long as I was. I don't think Tim Powers intended for me to go so long in the dark. That said, I've read a lot of books and am not easily lost. So, read this book with caution but DO go out and buy it now.

[Mike (the Paladin) · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's got to be an awfully big gold nugget to make trudging through 500 miles of mud, crud, and quick sand worth it. I didn't find this one worth it. The writer seems to find his stride somewhere around the middle of the book. By then I just didn't care. I skimmed my way on. I didn't care how much gold Grammar had left under what bricks or who couldn't see if you didn't look at them.

This is another one where I see high ratings and thrilled reviews, that's why I looked this book up. I found a long winded rambling intro that wanted to sound intricate. If you like this I'm happy for you, enjoy. As for me, I have at least several hundred books waiting to read and I'll never get the time I spent on this one back.

I at first was going to go 2 stars mainly because so many like the book and I want to be fair. After all, the writing may be better than I see, maybe it's just me, maybe the book just didn't appeal to me, but then... I'm supposed to rate the book based on my experience and what I think about it. So, long multi-directional opening that seemed to me not to have found it's way out of the swamp it got lost in. If it's your proverbial cup of tea, I'm happy for you. I don't care for it.

[Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Powers and James Blaylock are a genre of two... no-other authors I've read are as successful at creating the impression that there are strange depths hidden in, and consistent alternate explanations for, history as we know it. I'm a little at a loss as to how to characterize what they do. Their books have elements of the occult, but they are much more scientific and pragmatic than the typically melodramatic exemplars of that genre. They aren't alternate histories because nothing is changed... it is just that things didn't happen for the reasons we think they did (see: "The Drawing of the Dark" as perhaps the best example of this). They are (or have as backstory) secret histories... but then so is "Dictionary of the Khazars" by Milorad Pavic or "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges, and yet there's a world of difference between the two styles.

I'm not going to tell you what it's about because that's one of the joys of reading their books (note: don't read the backcover beforehand!).

Meticulously researched, well-written, endlessly inventive thrillers -- most books I've read by these two have been excellent... and "Three Days to Never" is no exception.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tim Powers has written some of my very favorite books, but this is not one of them. The last several of his books that I have read feel to me as if he is trying to parody his own better works. All of his hallmarks are here: time travel, proximity to historical characters, places or items imbued with power, strange and useful rituals, and cheap beer. Most of them are used in a clever way, but cleverness for its own sake doesn't really do anything for me. The whole thing feels impersonal and cluttered. New rules and superstitions and rituals pop up every page or so, but the reader never gets a chance to catch up or understand why or how they exist.

Finally, while I think Powers did solid research, oh weh -always in italics - is the worst transliteration of a good yiddish "oy vay" that I have ever seen. It looks like something Paris Hilton would say, or maybe a talking British lamb.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think that this is a pretty good 420 page novel that could have been a really great 320 page book. There are too many characters and time-lines and alternate realities and themes to really keep track of it all. You have ghosts and Einstein and Israel and Charlie Chaplin and alcoholism and time travel and secret societies and many, many other plot elements piled one atop the next. It was interesting while it was all flashing by, but somehow didn't quite manage to come together.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title should have been 4 Days to Never. Because it took me four days to know I'll never read any books by Tim Powers again.

[Elar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Powers knows how to combine actual facts with fantasy and outcome is very thrilling cloak and dagger story with remote viewing, different agencies, time travel and mucj more.

[Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read this book because I honestly couldn't remember much from my initial read; I think I read it at a bad time in my life or something. And honestly, I figured I probably wouldn't like it much since it hadn't left an impression but I actually really really did like it. Powers is an amazing writer but he's not great at doing character work for the most part; I feel like in this book he actually gets a lot of his characters exactly right and you really feel for them. The relationship between the MC and his daughter is touching and real; Powers doesn't fall into the Precocious Child Syndrome with Daphne and you feel her as a real kid which makes the bond between her and her father even more affecting. The romance is kind of forced, but I can live with that lol.

This is Powers at his most science fiction-y and I like it. His characterization of Einstein is fascinating--to the point I'd love to read a book about Powers's Einstein himself. The explanations as for why things are happening are kind of complex but they sound good....which is what matters! A fascinating book about choices, right and wrong, and the relationship between the past and the future.

[Isabella Avera · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was literally painful to read

[Michael Battaglia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are times when I think Tim Powers just sticks a bunch of famous names in a fish bowl, pulls out a couple and sees what kind of story he can make out of whatever handful of names emerges.

I may sound like I'm making fun but more often than not over the course of his career it works out brilliantly. Operating from a principle of taking actual historic events and adding mysterious/mystical elements to them, giving you the impression that there's a secret history at work all around you at all times with pretty high stakes. And while a number of his books are set in the past (career highlights "The Anubis Gates" and "The Stress of Her Regard") he's had pretty good results with books that are set closer to the present day, especially "Last Call" (probably one of the better places to start with him if you want to see what his style is like) and late career triumph "Declare". All of it highlights not only his tendency to play around with history but also his ridiculously intricate plotting, where even the knots themselves seem to have knots. Plans and counter-plans and counter-counter-plans are often in high abundance and while his books are action-packed enough to read quickly, reading too fast means you're going to miss the crucial stuff that he likes to slide into the periphery.

"Declare", the novel he wrote right before this, was probably the peak of this style, a Cold War spy novel that mixed in supernatural elements and a surprisingly formidable Kim Philby. Here, he doesn't try anything quite as daring but he feints toward it enough that there are plenty of moments when you wish he had just said "the heck with it" and gone all out, because what you're left with is a novel that doesn't necessarily feel like Powers on auto-pilot, more like a Powers that has been one too many times in the wash.

All the fun elements are there to start. Single dad Frank Marrity and his pre-teen daughter Daphne arrive at his grandmother's house to find the old lady gone, her backyard shed smelling like gasoline and some weird stuff inside, including cement enshrined hand- and footprints of Charlie Chaplin from the Chinese Theatre, an old videocassette and some letters from . . . Albert Einstein? And while that sounds like a pretty messed up scavenger hunt, there appears to be a purpose to all these random components, one that gets set off when Daphne decides to watch the videotape, and witnesses what appears to be an outtake from "Eraserhead". Before you can say "Cabals unite!" the two of them are being targeted by the Mossad, an entirely different mysterious organization featuring a blind woman who can see through other eyes, and some guy who claims to be Frank's long thought dead father. Gunfire ensues, kidnappings ensue, car chases ensue, you get the idea. And that's even before the weird ghosts start getting involved.

Powers' plotting is often so deft that it would make Charles Dickens blush but here he seems a bit pressed
for space and while huge novels don't always work in favor of his style, this is one of those books that
seems like it could have used another hundred or so pages to flesh out just exactly what is going on here. It probably has some of his most nonstop action sequences but in exchange for sacrificing some actual plot and character development, making it kind of like a baton race where you have to shout as much information as you can to the next person in the relay and hope that you got out enough so that it makes sense to the next person.

For the first time Powers' hand with tinkering with historical elements seems to fail him a little bit here, or he's just not sure how to incorporate it into the plot. He's working from rich soil, showcasing an Albert Einstein that might have invented a weird time machine, roping in Charlie Chaplin (who I didn’t realize had two lost films) and then overlaying all of that on his strange world where people interact with the dead and a guy has premonitions about stuff he'll never be able to do again, like hear the name "John Wayne". But none of elements seem to congeal properly, all of them floating around tangentially to each other like a version of the Pangea where each future continent is saying to the others over and over "I'm not touching you."

Maybe there's too many characters with too many agendas and special abilities. Frank and Daphne are easy enough to figure since after a certain point their only goal is survival but it seems like each Mossad agent and each super-secret other agent are all striving to be stars in the novel too, which makes it difficult to keep track of just what everyone wants. It doesn't help that Frank and Daphne also appear to have their own special abilities, with Frank's mild telepathy and Daphne's psychokinesis added to the mix as well. Part of the fun of a Powers novel is watching the main characters figuring out the rules to all this and then finding ways to turn them to their advantage but it feels like our heroes don't ever get a chance to catch their breath before the plot jerks them ever closer to the endgame, which mostly centers around "Will they die?"

All this means there's barely any time to mess with the historical stuff, so that until we get an extended flashback toward the end (which feels like the info-dump its desperately trying not to be) it all feels like window-dressing, not so much the background radiation of bad decisions but like that introductory text you read to the adventuring party before you start the latest dungeon crawl. The lack of Chaplin is incredibly disappointing, since I think there's great fun in the idea of taking Old Hollywood and making it a secret spooky place . . . but even his LA never feels as haunted as it could be (I mean, he pulls out the Wigwam Motel, so its not like he didn't do his research).

It all just swirls and circles, with so many characters that its hard to keep track who is on what side, so that when the inevitable double-crossings start to arise, its difficult to figure out if you should be shocked or not. But even beyond the stuff with Einstein, none of the weird stuff gets to sink in long enough to be weird so a lot of it winds up just being there, like he wrote down a bunch of guesses during a game of charades and decided to see if he could incorporate them into a novel. The Marritys' abilities, the creepy thing in the television that wants to be let in (handled a bit anticlimactically), the one guy worrying about what happens when he hears a phone ring . . . there's so much going on that gets thrown out and never developed again that you start to wonder if the editor's pen was a scythe instead or if Powers himself was intent on not making this book twice as long as it is but wasn't sure what to include or what to leave out (like how does Frank know how to do emergency surgery?).

The end result is something that feels like a haphazard cross between different sets of gears. The historical stuff, mostly kept at a distance, doesn't have the emotional heft of an involving plot attached to it while the plot barrels forward without the weight of the background to give you an excuse to pause and really get to know these people. Instead, you're left wondering if all the attention paid to everyone's personal problems (the blind woman definitely has a "set phasers to misery" attitude that the book doesn't fully justify) warrants all the crisis-laced running around. Even Frank's maybe-dad's actions seem less than rational and more dictated by the plot, which already seems out of breath by that point. And that's before the bullets start flying and the times start travelin'.

It’s a Powers' novel so its still engaging but the "wow" factor that normally comes with watching all the pieces of the plot interlock and play off each other isn't quite there, feeling more like someone dumped several puzzles on the floor and you're stuck trying to piece it all together. While there's some joy in the sense of discovery and accomplishment, you're not going to be too excited when you realize its just different pictures of covered bridges. In the past, Powers' talents were to convince you the ordinary wooden bridge was some extraordinary structure and understanding that in time was the difference between life and death. Here it feels more like an overgrown bridge with a rusted over plaque and someone standing inside going "Woooooo". I don't think he's written an outright bad novel and there's enough creativity here to suggest he hasn't lost a step but this one might have needed one more run through. It does make you wonder what an actual collaboration between Einstein and Chaplin would have looked like, though.

[thefourthvine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tim Powers returns to the wacked-out time travel fold, which he so memorably explored in The Anubis Gates, but this time he's thrown in alternate universes, paradoxes, the Mossad, a shady mystery cult, psychic powers, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, supernatural forces, and - look, if you want it, it's probably in here.

Powers also manages a fairly complex and intertwined action plot with a lot of skill. He even deftly copes with two very different characters who have the same name, something anyone who has ever written will appreciate is quite the feat. He handles the action plot so well that this book is quite a fast read; once it finds its feet, which happens fairly quickly, it's difficult to put the book down. The result is a novel that is a wild thrill ride for people who love alternate universes and time travel.

The only reason that I didn't rate this book five stars is that I was definitely done with it after one reading - I don't know that I'll be going back to re-read it any time soon, and probably that's because of character issues; although I liked almost all the main characters, I found myself unable to love them or connect with them. A less skilled writer would likely have ended up with characters who were just tools of this particular plot, and it's impressive that that didn't happen here, but still - it's the plot, not the people, that made this book so much fun for me. So it's delightful once, but it's never going to make one of my all-time favorite lists.