The gone world by tom sweterlitsch
Title:
The Gone World
Author:
Tom Sweterlitsch
Genre:
Science Fiction, Thriller
Publisher:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date:
February 2019
Paperback:
400 pages
“I promise you have never read a story like this.”—Blake Crouch,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Dark Matter
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
“She had been warned she would see things her mind wouldn’t understand.”
I picked up
The Gone World
by Tom Sweterlitsch while browsing new releases at the local library based on nothing more than the title and evocative cover. On my second read through of the jacket cover blurb I gave up on understanding the plot summation and decided to take a risk on the book. I got far enough to see it has something to do with murder and time travel, and if there is one genre that is catnip for me, it’s time travel thrillers. I’m happy to say this blind grab was absolutely worth it.
The Gone World
is dark, twisty, and inventive, with big ideas and a plot that grabs you from the prologue. More than just an empty thrill machine, the characters are the engine that drives the plot forward keeping the reader engaged as the story gets more and more haywire.
Since the 1970’s the US has been secretly conducting a number of Deep Space and Deep Time travel exploration under the arm of the Naval Space Command (NSC). The only “real” world is the present day, referred to as Terra Firma. In the novel Terra Firma is March 1997. Time travelers can only move forward from
The Gone World
This Christmas a member of the family introduced me to NCIS. For those who have yet to discover this long-running US-based TV show it's a police-procedural series that follows the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Until this time I hadn't even known such an organisation existed, not to mention the fact that most of the show seems to be based on land, not sea.
Why do I mention this? Coincidentally one of the first books I pick up after watching this show is
The Gone World
. A book that features none-other than the NCIS, investigating a murder of a Navy Seal's family while trying to locate a missing girl of the same family. Special agent Shannon Moss is the member of a top secret department within the NCIS, a department that explores space and travels through time. Time and space travel is handled through ships launched from a base on the dark side of the moon.
There is a bigger problem though and that's a white hole appearing above the Earth in humanities near future, an event (known as Terminus) that puts an end to the human race. What's worse is that this cataclysmic event seems to be moving backwards through time towards the relative
Words
&
Dirt
It feels odd to call Tom Sweterlitsch’s
The Gone World
a “fun” read, but fun is a whole lot of what I had while reading it. In this riveting and extremely grim science fiction thriller, the classic detective novel gets a time travel twist. Sweterlitsch’s imagination demonstrates impressive nuance and scope, and his prose slices the mind like a brutal blade.
The Gone World
begins in 1997, and tells the story of Shannon Moss, an agent working for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). In most ways, Moss is a typical hard-boiled detective: highly intelligent, intimate with humanity’s dark side, and sporting a gruff persona that conceals a vulnerable and compassionate heart. The one notable exception is her left leg, which was amputated above the knee after an accident in the field. Moss’s relationship with her own physicality and ambulation through the use of various prosthetics are differentiating factors that make her more interesting and sympathetic than other protagonists in this genre.
Moss’s particular role within NCIS isn’t what you’d expect. In order to solve high-priority crimes fo