I’m reading Tim Powers’ new novel, Three Days to Never.
This is his first new novel in five years, the previous one being Declare (2001), so its release is an occasion among Tim Powers fans.
Whereas Declare was heavily Catholic themed, this one is more Jewish-themed and involves a secret history spy story involving time travel and ghosts and dybbuks.
So far, I’m enjoying it very much. Powersis his usual, hyperinventive self, and I’ll offer my comments after I’ve had a chance to finish it.
In the meantime, you can
READ A REVIEW OF IT BY JOHN SHIRLEY.
Here’s a taste:
Tim Powers is his own genre. There are a few other novelists who write urban fantasy — de Lint and Gaiman, perhaps one or two others who attempt to bind physics and metaphysics, the spy novel with the novel of the fantastic, but none who move us with such proficiency, such deceptive ease from the gritty to the transcendent; who so excel at making us feel we too, if we follow directions, can travel effortlessly from three dimensions, to four, to five.
Currently there are two editions of the book in print. One, an ordinary hardback
There is also a special edition (pictured above) that has cool illustrations and that comes with a chapbook of sonnets written by one of the characters in the novel.
Enjoy!
I can’t wait to get my own copy!
Me too! I just wish I could afford the private press edition.
I agree with Gaiman comparison. I love the stuff Gaiman did for the Sandman series but I stopped reading one of his halfway through when I realized I expected something more along the lines of Powers-caliber work.
It’s not that Gaiman was not inventive enough, it is just that everything else in the genre just sort of falls flat once you’ve read Powers.
Are you certain the chapbook comes with the illustrated edition? I see nothing mentioned about it on Amazon.
Well, according to Subterranean Press–the publisher of the limited edition–the chapbook is included:
http://tinyurl.com/d2l9y
The site states: “Our edition of Three Days to Never will be accompanied by a bonus chapbook by Tim Powers: Nine Sonnets by Thomas Francis Marrity, one of the characters in the novel.”
It’s the limited edition (not the boxed, lettered edition) that Amazon is carrying, so I *think* it’d be included, but I can try to check further.
That would be great if you could find out. Which of the two editions (“boxed, lettered and $600” or “limited, $80”) does “our edition” refer to?
The word I have back is that Amazon *should* be shipping the chapbook.
The chapbook should ship with every copy of the $80 signed, limited edition.
It is *not* restricted to the $600 boxed, signed, lettered edition.
Isn’t Gene Wolfe another good Catholic Sci-Fi/Fantasy writer?
He’s the best there is! (IMHO, and no disrespect meant to Tim Powers or any other Catholic writers of SF/Fantasy.)
I found this from an interview with Tim Powers about the book
at http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw13260.html. Very interesting…
I also recommend his novel Declare, his best in my opinion.
You’ve remarked in the past that magic always damages, indeed ruins, its users. Three Days certainly bears that out, witness the fates of Golze, Rascasse, “Derek Marrity,” Mishal. Why do you underline this point so consistently in your work?
Powers: It just seems to me natural, obvious, that if magic was real it would be damaging to the practitioner. (Probably that’s an effect of me being Catholic.) Magic always seems to work by short-circuiting the natural laws—like kiting checks, or putting a penny behind the fuse, or taking “hair of the dog” to cure a hangover. It gets you past immediate problems, but at the cost of much bigger problems later on.
And in plot terms, it’s much more useful to have a powerful element like magic be inherently very damaging—spiritually and physically—than to have it be just a morally neutral technology. If a character simply has “the gift of healing,” it might as well be “the gift of penicillin.” I want magic to have the vertiginous effects and scary consequences of violating reality.