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    Three Days to Never
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    Three Days to Never
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    Three Days to Never
    Ebook489 pages10 hours

    Three Days to Never

    By Tim Powers

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From multi-award-winning fantasy writer Tim Powers - the exhilerating masterwork Three Days to Never

    When Albert Einstein told Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 that the atomic bomb was possible, he did not tell the president about another discovery he had made, something so extreme and horrific it remained a secret . . . until now. This extraordinary new novel from one of the most brilliant talents in contemporary fiction is a standout literary thriller in which one man stumbles upon the discovery Einstein himself tried to keep hidden.

    When twelve-year-old Daphne Marrity takes a videotape labeled Pee-wee's Big Adventure from her grandmother's house, neither she nor her college-professor father, Frank Marrity, has any idea that the theft has drawn the attention of both the Israeli Secret Service and an ancient European cabal of occultists-or that within hours they'll be visited by her long-lost grandfather, who is also desperate to get that tape.

    And when Daphne's teddy bear is stolen, a blind assassin nearly kills Frank, and a phantom begins to speak to her from a switched-off television set, Daphne and her father find themselves caught in the middle of a murderous power struggle that originated long ago in Israel and Germany but now crashes through Los Angeles and out to the Mojave Desert. To survive, they must quickly learn the rules of a dangerous magical chess game and use all their cleverness and courage-as well as their love and loyalty to each other-to escape a fate more profound than death.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCorvus
    Release dateDec 1, 2012
    ISBN9780857897107
    Unavailable
    Three Days to Never
    Author

    Tim Powers

    Tim Powers is the author of numerous novels including Hide Me Among the Graves, Three Days to Never, Declare, Last Call, and On Stranger Tides, which inspired the feature film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. He has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award twice, and the World Fantasy Award three times. He lives in San Bernardino, California.

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    Reviews for Three Days to Never

    3.5/5

    256 ratings20 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Very Very Strange Indeed. Like adpaton I struggled to get through this book, it is the first Tim Powers I have read and it is unlikely to attract me back to this author. Only 2 likeable characters and a plot so convoluted it is difficult to follow and trust me this is not usually a problem for me. The remaining cast are either very odd or dislikeable with names which appear to have been chosen to make the book hard. In short not for me.
    • 3/5
      This was a good read - main characters you can believe in and care about, time-travel, telepathy, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Mossad and a sinister group called the Vespers (descendants of the Albigenses, a French sect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

      I was never very clear about the motives of the Vespers, apart from the fact that they were clearly The Bad Guys because of the way they kept murdering people. It also wasn't obvious to me why Daphne ended up with the ability to destroy things at will, but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the story too much - I was perfectly willing to suspend disbelief and go along for the ride.

    • 1/5
      I have really enjoyed some of Tim Powers' books and hated others: this falls into the later category. Daphne Marrity has a psychic link to her father Frank and both are surprised to recieve a phone call from Frank's grandmother Lisa informing them she is about to burn down the garden shed. But the shed is not burned down and they soon realise something is amiis.Chaos and surreal disorder follow as the Mossad get involved with an ancient and evil cabalistic group: the goal is the machine Einstein felt too deadly to unleash onto the world - a time travel device allowing for the complete eradication of people, thus changing history. Frank is visited by a man claiming to be his long-lost father but whom we soon learn is actually future Frank, returned to kill Daphne whom he feels has poisoned his life. It transpires that Einstein, who was their great grandfather, was also a time traveller who, by returning to prevent the suicide of his friend Adler, inadvertently caused a world war. In another time travel episode Einstein was accompanied by infantile versions of himself, one of whom was taken and raised by his illegitimate daughter Lisa. This child later fathered Frank before disappearing - actually he was murdered by the evil cabal of occultists. Confused? Me too. The book stuttered and stalled and despite being stuck in an aeroplane for over five hours I battled to read it.
    • 2/5
      I found this a bit "Ho! Hum!" It dealt with no personal issues and was primarily a a story constructed to use the name of Einstein and pull in a few elements of physics theory. Not a book I can recommend which is disappointing as I enjoyed "The Anubis Gate" and "Declare".
    • 3/5
      Back once again at the question of how to rate a book that tried to do something ambitious and didn't altogether succeed. If this had worked, it would have been awesome. If he'd managed to pull together Einstein, the Mossad, Charlie Chaplin, time travel, seraphim, the law of conservation of energy, and Grauman's Chinese Theater into a single plot that worked that would have been just great fun indeed. He almost pulled it off but the whole structure sort of creaks at the seams and leans from one side to the other and he has to keep running around shoring it up with interjections and explanatory this-is-what-just-happened passages.

      This story is told from many points of view, I count at least nine different pov's that carry major parts of the narrative. It would take a real master of prose to keep that juggling act from breaking down into incoherence, and I guess its a measure of Power's skills that he just about manages it. But I don't see that the multiplicity actually adds enough to the story to be worth the effort required.

      In the same vein, the story gets told in and out of order, with flashbacks and flashforwards, some which are from unreliable narrators and others from narrators who are telling the truth as they see it but are misled. There are bits and peices that seem to be tossed in just because they were lying around the workshop and what the heck, its already a Heinz 57 of a novel so why not add them?

      That may actually be the issue with this book - its just too much stuff for not enough good reasons. Like a cell phone that takes photos but also works as a blender and has a built in retractable steam shovel. Okay its clever that someone managed to pack all of that into one package but what am I supposed to DO with it? Make mai tai's while I dig up the sidewalk?
    • 2/5
      The book starts slow, but picks up in pace as it continues and plot-lines connect.Reminds one of Last Call (Mystic screening, etc.) and The Anubis Gates (Literature and time travel).Unlike his other books, where what we face we understand, and as time goes on we get revealed more and understand more, here we get revealed more from the get-go, but only understand it later.I think it was not the right book to translate, it came out in 2006 and was translated to Hebrew in 2008, but it was translated because he thanks people from the Israeli book scene and researched stuff during his visit here in 2005.Two things don't make sense, why did grandma have a gold swastika at the place she reached, and how did it get there?And why did Oren get a phantom-baby when he traveled back, shouldn't it only appear when he slingshots back to the present?
    • 4/5
      This is another Tim Powers urban fantasy thriller, and if you like his style you won't be disappointed with this one. This book cleverly mixes up Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, the Nazis, Mossad, a time machine, and a man whose daughter might be dead in another timeline.It's fast paced, and the sheer abundance and verve of the telling make it hard to put down.
    • 3/5
      Tim Powers is one of my favorite authors, but this is not one of my favorite of his books. There are a few clever aspects -- he always starts his books well, and the woman who can only see out of other peoples' eyes is a great idea. But the plot gets bogged down by a too-intricate and unpredictable supernatural plot, and he has too many characters and so can't focus enough on the core (as usual, mostly family) relationships. The climactic scene is written as if Powers was trying to get all the information from a complex 5-D map and schematic into text, and it just doesn't work. My suggestion is to re-read Declare instead.
    • 4/5
      It's almost redundant to say this is an odd book - it's a Tim Powers book after all. But even for him, it's an odd book.It's set (mostly) in 1987 LA and concerns the hidden inventions of Einstein - a machine that lets you travel in space and time, and a process that lets you completely remove someone from space-time. It mixes in psychic investigators and remote viewers from government programmes and a huge dose of literary material that initially makes sense and then becomes increasingly bizarrely related to the story.Despite all of that, it is a good read. It's a bit slow at times but it's fascinating and wonderfully done.
    • 4/5
      This is the first book by Tim Powers that I read and I thought it was pretty good if a bit confusing at times. But good confusing, like Lost. I haven't read anything in a while (not since the Illuminatus Trilogy maybe) that includes so much occult activities in a modern setting. You've got spies, psychic powers, poltergeists, telepathy, remote viewing, time travel, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, a blind woman who sees out of other people's eyes (her memories of sex are of her own face, not her lovers'). It is a heady mix and it took me a little bit to get into it, but by the second half of the book it was whizzing along. And the ending actually made sense and explained everything to my satisfaction. Let's hope Lost can do the same!
    • 4/5
      A sci-fi-ish novel I'd have never picked up without reading a positive review, but what a reward! A father and daughter become enmeshed in a government plot, and the father not only sees the future, but has to make an incredibly difficult moral choice. I'll definitely be reading Tim Powers again.
    • 4/5
      The first half of the book is frustrating but the second half is great.
    • 3/5
      Cluttered with unmemorable, interchangeable characters, this story pulls Einstein and Chaplin into a messy tale of espionage, ESP, and time travel. There were little nuggets of creativity, though: the blind woman who can see through others' eyes, the Mossad agent who suddenly knows that what he has just done is the last time he will do that, the infant doppelgangers that appear when one returns from time traveling.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful. If you're a Powers fan, this will satisfy. If you're not a Powers fank, it's wonderful, though not the best introduction to powers that there is. Read it anyway. Once again Powers explores the impact of the past on our present perception of reality, the import of other dimensions, and how what we think and how we love is the most important thing we will ever do.
    • 5/5
      I'd put this right up there with The Anubis Gates and Last Call as my favorite Tim Powers books, and one that I will read over and over again. As with most of his books, it has an everyman caught up in something he doesn't understand, trying to find a way out. There are supernatural powers that he must understand and learn to manipulate while multiple shadowy conspiracies with their own agendas try to help, or harm, or simply use him.Why do I like these the best? They are the ones that pull me in to the story, that feel like they are the best crafted. With some of his other books the McGuffin ties him too much to established genres - vampires, pirates, etc. - or his own previous stories and it effects the rhythm of the story he's trying to tell.Start with any of these three Powers books and you'll be hooked.
    • 4/5
      I'm never too sure what I think of Tim POwers books til i've read them several times. This one seemed to me like a return to the more compelling books he wrote set in contempory america (OK, I know its 1986, but thats contemporary enough) such as Last Call, and I did feel very involved with the characters. Still not sure i liked it as much as some of his work, but then all Tim Powers books are great, so thats just nit-picking.
    • 5/5
      This book is, well, Powersian. Take Einstein, Chaplin, time travel, Mosad, and a group called Vespers that has a mummified head and throw in Frank Marrity, an English professor, and his daughter, Daphne, who just happen to stumble into this mess via Grammar, Frank's grandmother. Obviously there are good guys, bad guys, and confused guys. I would have liked to know a bit more about the Vespers--any group that refers to the mummified head it has as the Baphomet head is sure to intrigue me. Perhaps I'd have been less interested in them if I knew more. But as with all Powers's books, it was weird, and funky, and Powersian. It's the best adjective I can come up with.
    • 4/5
      Tim Powers has a formula. Start with actual history, and focus on parts of it where what we know trails off into mystery. Fill in the unknown with elements of the fantastic. Connect it all to the lives of his characters via a fast-paced story.But that formula doesn't constrain any of the inventive, exciting stories Powers writes with it. In Three Days to Never, the principal historical mystery concerns Lieserl Marić, first child of Albert Einstein and his first wife Mileva Marić. Lieserl was born in 1902, before Einstein and Marić married. That she had ever existed was unknown to the world before the 1980s, and history does not record her true name or what became of her. The linked Wikipedia article states that most observers think she died in infancy.Powers imagines a much longer, eventful life for her, ending in California in her old age, in 1987. We learn a lot about that life, but much remains unknown, as she appears only as her descendants knew her. Frank Marrity knew Lieserl as his grandmother Lisa. He and his daughter Daphne find their lives - and much more - endangered by agents of secret organizations, who want the magical artifacts Lieserl guarded. Powers mixes time travel, Jewish mysticism, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, family dysfunction, the Six-Day War, relativity, paranormal powers, the Holy Grail, the Cold War, and California's architecture and landscape into his fast-moving story.I'm bothered a bit by Powers using one of the most significant scientists of the twentieth century as a sort of arch-mage. But, given how badly Einstein treated Mileva Marić, maybe that's only fair, somehow.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Time travelling Nazis, Albert Einstein's ghost, seance holding Mossad agents, dybbuks, blind Shakespeare quoting psychics, drunk English professors . . . . you get the picture. Scholarly,entertaining and well written, if a bit confusing at times ( I kept think of Shel Silverstein's "I'm My Own Grandpa" when multiple iterations of the same person appear at once)