Review of The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

A few weekends ago, I discovered the first season of Halo was on Netflix and virtually binged it. It was better than I expected—for my expectations were low—and exactly what I craved: something visually stimulating, with a clear story, yet ultimately not all that … meaningful, I guess? “Mid” is probably the right term all the kids are using these days. Anyway, The Third Rule of Time Travel is just like that. Like the Halo series, its production values are too high to be called “pulp”—this is a book that takes itself seriously both as science fiction and literature—yet its execution is decidedly mid. That’s no shade to Philip Fracassi, who has clearly taken the time (pun intended) to craft a fun little time travel story. I received an eARC from NetGalley and Orbit in return for a review.

Beth Darlow is a physicist carrying on the project she began with her late husband, Colson: a time machine. So far, the machine can send a traveller mentally into their own past for ninety seconds. Still grieving and under pressure to deliver something marketable, Beth subjects herself to the stress of reliving some of her worst moments in her life. Then, things start going wrong.

We love to see a woman in STEM as the protagonist! The Third Rule of Time Travel also reminds me of Boss Level on Netflix, a time-loop movie. Both have about the same level of character depth, especially when it comes to their villains. Both have the protagonist somewhat motivated by the death of their significant other, who is a physicist working on a time machine of sorts. Yet Boss Level unapologetically embraces trite action-hero tropes with a fridged damsel and a buff, macho male protagonist. In contrast, Fracassi here has killed off the husband, and Beth is every bit the physicist and hero this book needs.

Now, Beth is a little spiky and seems to have traits of a male author trying to write his breast. Lots of emphasis on Beth’s maternal drive, her Power of Love for Isabel overcoming some of the worst shenanigans of the book. Similarly, constant allusion to how Beth is isolated at work, the only woman in STEM there apparently, and she has to keep her temper under control lest she be seen as a hotheaded and irrational lady scientist by all the men! It’s not subtle at all and feels very much like a man trying to telegraph, far too loudly, “Look, women readers, I too have empathy for your struggle against patriarchy.” Thanks, I guess?

I assure you, however: I mock out of love. The Third Rule of Time Travel has a lot to recommend it. Although I won’t go so far as to describe any of its time-travel mechanics as original or particularly mind-bendy, Fracassi overall makes use of some interesting ideas. The debriefing mechanic in particular is one that, once explained in the story, initially sounds really impossible but is actually based on fairly simple ideas about light cones and worldlines. I don’t know, I’ve read quite a few literary time-travel novels that are apathetic to how their time travel actually works, so it’s nice to see one that at least pretends to care.

Other than that, this book follows much the same arc as most of those novels: main character can travel through time; main character discovers time travel kind of sucks and is really dangerous; main character deals with fallout of time travel, usually by seeking to undo damage; main character discovers the real family is the family she had at home all along. If you’ve read The Time Traveler’s Wife or Oona Out of Order or watched About Time or any such movies with pretensions to Big Ideas But Make It Timey-Wimey, then you get the vibe.

However, Fracassi also can’t resist shoehorning in a thriller subplot with delightfully cartoonish characters. I kept laughing every time the evil boss shows up because he’s so transparently inconsistent and exists solely to make Beth’s life worse. The climax of the novel feels very forced and awkward as the story contorts itself from psychological thriller into action thriller, almost s if its own timeline is being rewritten.

This culminates in a classic kind of resolution for this type of science-fiction-by-association: the What the Bleep Do We Know?–style syncretic speculation that it’s all connected, man, and if we could slip the bonds of our linear temporal existence we would, like, see the time knife. The moment between Beth and Colson is meant to be incredibly emotional, a fulfillment of hundreds of pages leading up to it … and yet.

So here’s the bottom line: this book is fine. I came to it off of DNFing a different book that was dull. So yes, I’m critical of The Third Rule of Time Travel’s overall quality as a story. Yet I’ll happily share that I devoured this book in a single day over about two sittings. Like that first season of Halo, this book is flashy and easy on the eyes and aspires to be more than it is. That doesn’t mean it succeeds. But it’s fun to watch it try.