Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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. :)

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