Scientist Beth Darlow has discovered the unimaginable. She’s built a machine that allows human consciousness to travel through time—to any point in the traveler’s lifetime—and relive moments of their life. An impossible breakthrough, but it’s not perfect: the traveler has no way to interact with the past. They can only observe.
After Beth’s husband, Colson, the co-creator of the machine, dies in a tragic car accident, Beth is left to raise Isabella—their only daughter—and continue the work they started. Mired in grief and threatened by her ruthless CEO, Beth pushes herself to the limit to prove the value of her technology.
Then the impossible happens. Simply viewing personal history should not alter the present, but with each new observation she makes, her own timeline begins to warp.
As her reality constantly shifts, Beth must solve the puzzles of her past, even if it means forsaking her future.
Hey, look at me slowly getting back into sci-fi a little! Never mind the fact that the two sci-fi books I’ve read recently are from horror authors.
I SAID NEVER MIND!!
*ahem*
Philip Fracassi is responsible for two of the best horror novels I’ve read in the last couple years, THE AUTUMN SPRINGS RETIREMENT HOME MASSACRE and BOYS IN THE VALLEY, so it’s cool to try something totally different from him, like THE THIRD RULE OF TIME TRAVEL!
Unlike Daniel Kraus’s THE SIXTH NIK (which I recently reviewed), this is not a horror/sci-fi mashup. THE THIRD RULE OF TIME TRAVEL is pure sci-fi magic, and almost reminded me a bit of Michael Crichton. Or at least, it made me feel the way I remember feeling as a teenager, devouring Crichton books like JURASSIC PARK, SPHERE, or THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN in a day or two on summer vacation!
Time travel has gotta be one of the wildest concepts in sci-fi, no? There’s just something about the very idea of it & all the myriad complications that can arise from it…it gets my head spinning! And this book did that and then some. This is a very different version of time travel from anything I’ve seen before, and yeah…this is some wild stuff!
The book is set in the near future, in 2044. Our main character is Beth Darlow, a scientist who, along with her late husband, Colson, has made the ultimate discovery: time travel. Or, a form of it, anyway.
Beth’s machine can transport the user’s consciousness back to a point in their own past. It’s not just reliving a memory, you are physically back in that time, reliving a moment. The catch is that, for now, the machine picks the moment. Maybe it’s random and maybe it’s not, but at any rate, the machine decides. You can’t alter the outcome of the moment, and for the sake of your safety, you can only stay for 90 seconds.
The book opens with Beth reliving one of the worst moments of her life: being the lone survivor of a small plane crash that claimed the lives of her entire immediate family.
And as we learn right away, Beth is still grieving the somewhat-recent loss of her husband, who died in a car accident.
It should go without saying, but Beth is living with an enormous amount of trauma and grief. And she doesn’t exactly deal with it in the healthiest of ways, choosing to fully immerse herself in her work instead.
She has a four-year-old daughter named Isabella, whom she loves fiercely. But it’s like Beth is in a constant battle with herself, torn between being there for Isabella (who is more often than not with her nanny, Marie Elena) and giving everything she has to the project at work.
A project that is being unfairly rushed by the greedy corporation that Beth works for.
And the more Beth travels…well, things start getting stranger and stranger all the time. She begins to question her reality, because her reality seems to be changing in some ways.
Things get bananas! Time travel novels inherently can feel confusing, and get you stuck in your head a lot. And THE THIRD RULE OF TIME TRAVEL certainly does that. But Fracassi also keeps the reader relatively grounded in reality, which makes the story feel super believable. And it’s Beth’s love for Isabella that drives the whole story. Beth is a million miles from perfect, but she’s a great mom, and her protectiveness over Isabella really shines in this book. There’s a lot of grief in THE THIRD RULE OF TIME TRAVEL, and a lot of hope, too.
I really dug this one! Philip Fracassi is such a fantastic storyteller, and this was a good reminder for me to keep picking away at some of his earlier books!
Grimdark Dad 