[books 2015] Tim Powers
Sep. 17th, 2015 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro40. Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
I'm a huge fan of The Anubis Gates, The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Declare. Parts of Earthquake Weather fell a bit flat for me so I haven't been keeping up with Powers' output.
This is a time-travelling espionage tale following a father and daughter in California in 1987. The dad's grandmother dies, and it turns out she was Einstein's daughter and that she had a time machine that Einstein invented in her shed (as you do). Mossad are after it, using remote viewing - something that all sides attempted during the Cold War. So are a more shadowy organisation using even more dubious magical means (lots of human sacrifice).
I sailed through the first 3/4 of this book. Not entirely sure why - it's not the characters, who, with the exception of the little girl, are all pretty awful human beings and most of them are functional alcoholics (it goes with the territory of messing with supernatural stuff) - but anyway, it's good page-turning trashy adventure.
Struggled a bit with the last quarter, for equally mysterious reasons. All of the reviews on Amazon say that the book is too long, and I have to agree. It's not one where you can pinpoint a long passage that should have been excised, but there are definitely too many episodes with the various spy outfits which, individually, move the plot on, but add up to getting repetitive.
Not even close to Powers' best work, and couldn't be further away from Declare, his other weird shit spy story (that has more in common with The Anubis Gates etc), but worth while. Frustrating, though, because trimmed down a bit it could have been excellent.
I'm a huge fan of The Anubis Gates, The Drawing of the Dark, On Stranger Tides and Declare. Parts of Earthquake Weather fell a bit flat for me so I haven't been keeping up with Powers' output.
This is a time-travelling espionage tale following a father and daughter in California in 1987. The dad's grandmother dies, and it turns out she was Einstein's daughter and that she had a time machine that Einstein invented in her shed (as you do). Mossad are after it, using remote viewing - something that all sides attempted during the Cold War. So are a more shadowy organisation using even more dubious magical means (lots of human sacrifice).
I sailed through the first 3/4 of this book. Not entirely sure why - it's not the characters, who, with the exception of the little girl, are all pretty awful human beings and most of them are functional alcoholics (it goes with the territory of messing with supernatural stuff) - but anyway, it's good page-turning trashy adventure.
Struggled a bit with the last quarter, for equally mysterious reasons. All of the reviews on Amazon say that the book is too long, and I have to agree. It's not one where you can pinpoint a long passage that should have been excised, but there are definitely too many episodes with the various spy outfits which, individually, move the plot on, but add up to getting repetitive.
Not even close to Powers' best work, and couldn't be further away from Declare, his other weird shit spy story (that has more in common with The Anubis Gates etc), but worth while. Frustrating, though, because trimmed down a bit it could have been excellent.
