It is a rule of time travel stories that they must have rules. In Philip Fracassi’s new book The Third Rule of Time Travel, those rules are made clear very early and very traumatically. Once you have rules, of course, as with Asimov’s laws of robotics, the trick becomes how to subvert them. The question that Fracassi hints at through the opening section of his book, is whether the rules themselves are fixed.
When The Third Rule of Time Travel opens, Beth is being forced to relive one of the worst days of her life – when she survived a plane crash that killed the rest of her family. She can do this using a machine created by her and her husband Colson that can send consciousness back in time and allow someone to relive a moment of their life. There are, of course, three rules:
- The traveller can only go backwards in time
- The trip can only last 90 seconds
- The traveller can only observe
Beth and Colson developed these rules, but they are not strictly rules, more observations of how the machine they built works. Readers quickly learn that Beth is still grieving following Colson’s death the year before, but she presses on, determined to finish their project and deliver a machine that has practical impacts. And she can do that because the whole project is bankrolled by multi-billionaire Jim Langan. More pressure is placed on Beth when Langan invites in a journalist into Beth’s lab as he wants to take the project public. As a result, Beth is forced to demonstrate the machine more only to find herself in even more traumatic moments of her life.
As with almost all time travel tales (and there are plenty – Doctor Who, Back to the Future, The Ministry of Time, The Future of Another Timeline, The Time Traveller’s Wife, 11/22/63, Recursion, Terminator – to namecheck a few) the trick to enjoying them is to not think too deeply about the mechanics. Because eventually, and inevitably, you are going to hit a paradox or some plot point that does not quite work. Fracassi helps readers roll past any qualms by delivering a fast-paced plot full of hints, foreshadowing and paranoia and a main character who readers can deeply invest in.
Fracassi has written a fair amount in the horror genre and knows how to deliver a creeping dread just by tweaking small details and keeping his protagonist (and reader) off balance. In The Third Rule of Time Travel he combines this skill with some mind bending chrono-gymnastics, consideration of many-worlds theory and a dash of philosophy all to great effect. He manages to keep all of these elements together for long enough to effectively deliver a piece of fun, page-turning science fiction.
The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi
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