Some novels take their time to build; some start with a sprint and keep going from there. The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch falls in the second category. The prologue packs a ton of ideas and hooked me immediately. It set a very high standard that the rest of the book surpassed. Mr. Sweterlitsch mixed Lovecraftian horror with a mystery in a science fictional setting. It’s got cosmic horror. It’s got spaceships. It’s got a disabled, female detective. It’s got time travel. In fact, it’s got it all. The Gone World takes a lot of excellent ideas and combines them to get a novel that is greater than them all.
TL;DR: A time traveling, horror mystery that twists and turns while remaining an intimately human story. Highly recommended for fans of the TV show Fringe. Highly recommended for science fiction and horror fans.
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Inception meets True Detective in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind…
Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family—and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can’t share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL’s experience with the future has triggered this violence.
Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it’s not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time’s horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.
Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.
The Gone World is billed as a time travel novel, and it is. But I found it to be a unique take on time travel. The use of space and cosmic travel adds in the science fiction element, and the Terminus, the end of humanity, adds in the Lovecraftian horror elements. The main story device is a mystery/police procedural following NCIS agent Shannon Moss. In other words, it’s a novel of big and many ideas. Mr. Sweterlitsch combines them all flawlessly. There’s enough handwavium to make the SF work; the horror is sufficiently terrifying to make it work; and the mystery is intriguing enough to draw us along. There is so much packed in here that in the hands of a lesser author, it would feel stitched together. Each aspect of this story arises naturally from every other aspect of the novel.
The main character, Shannon Moss, was deep, believable, and flawed. Seeing the mystery unfold from her perspective put a darker spin on the story than if another of the investigators had been the main character. Her backstory haunts her – and us – through the whole story, and it makes certain actions even more understandable. Her character and her job make her sympathetic even as it distances her from others in her world, and I felt for her as she struggles to connect to her mom and colleagues even as her time travel escapades necessarily distances her from them. This novel works because Shannon Moss is such a great character. In a novel full of ideas, full of genre decorations, the story is Shannon Moss. Even now, I can’t say if I liked her or not, but without a doubt, I wanted her to succeed, and without a doubt, she was the good guy, the white hat, the hero. What I did admire about her is the shear stubborn perseverance she showed to get to the end of the novel. Sweterlitsch did not pull any punches towards any character in the book. Because of that, he gave us a book about broken, flawed people, doing their best to save the world by finding a missing girl.
The two above paragraphs are just saying that the writing in this book is great. I enjoyed the high tension moments and wanted to get to the next revelation, but I also liked dwelling in the slow moments and learning about Moss and about her world. There’s a lot to admire here in a character driven novel of big, big ideas. It scales both cosmic and human at the same time, and you are filled with existential dread at the same moments of personal dread for a particular character. I was in the novel the whole time, and I bought the science fictional elements used to give us Deep Space and Deep Time.
To be absolutely clear, I hate time travel stories. Much like dream stories, they are essentially meaningless. What is the point if the hero can go back and change things such that the timeline of the story never happened?1 The Gone World has found a way to make me enjoy a time travel story by going forward in time and creating potential futures. Shannon doesn’t travel backwards into the past. She starts at the now and travels forward. When she returns, she can’t go back any farther than the moment she left. That is fantastic and, potentially, could comply with the laws of physics (quantum foam, wormholes, handwavium). I found it a very creative and refreshing take on time travel, and Mr. Sweterlitsch explores the consequences of his version of time travel in human terms. This made me care about these possible futures as more than just tools of the story. Moss’s world has considered the ethical implications of the travel that they do, and it’s clear that time travel is not the deus ex machina that would make the story frustrating. It’s clear Mr. Sweterlitsch has thought and considered the implications of time travel from many sides, and that is why, even though I hate time travel stories, I love this one. The Gone World doesn’t use time travel as a plot driver but as a means to explore how humans interact with and use one another to further goals. In this case, Moss is using humans in an altruistic way to find a missing girl, but it comes at a cost that Mr. Sweterlitsch doesn’t shy away from.
The ending was easy to predict about a third to halfway into the novel. When I figured it out, I still wanted to see how Shannon achieved her goal. Even so, it surprised me how much I liked the ending. Following Shannon made the journey enjoyable even though I knew where the end would be. It’s a dark book, but there are moments of happiness and kindness in the story that balance it out. Now that it’s ended, though, I question those moments of happiness and kindness. This is not a bad thing. The book has me questioning what happened in it and wondering just how connected many of the events are. Any book that makes me think about it for days after the cover closes is a success. I think a reread is in order.
The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch is an outstanding book. It’s a must read for fans of science fictional horror and recommended to anyone who likes creative approaches to genre tropes. The entire story from start to finish reminded me of the best episodes of Fringe. I would love to see HBO turn this book into a season or two of television2. There is so much to love in this book, and the only way that I can think of ending this review is say, “Go buy it, buy it now, read it, and then read it again as soon as you finish.”
9/10
The Gone World is on sale today (2/6/2018) from Penguin Random House.
1. The easy answer is, of course, that the journey the story takes is the important and meaningful part. The characters in the world may be unaffected, but the reader is changed.
2. Neil Blomkamp of District 9 fame is set to the direct the movie based on this book.