The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Horror, Fiction, Time Travel, Mystery, Thriller, Audiobook

399 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 6, 2018

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I honestly didn't expect this novel to be quite as hard-hitting as it turned out to be.

From the opening passages, I was plunged into a nightmare future world of nanotech and some humanity-ending Cthulhu-esq horrorshow of humans hanging from trees, undying hoards of men and women running, insane, and us, time-travelers in a spacecraft, observing our own future end creeping up on us sooner and sooner and sooner.

OMG, I LOVE THIS. This just blows me away.

But right before it scares off the normals, the author backs us up and plants us firmly in a top-secret NCIS investigatory world that has time travel and deep-space spacecraft. And mundane murder on the world in the meantime. And the means to travel through time to help solve the sticklers. :)

I think I loved all the hard-SF elements the most, second by the MANY MANY MANY shadow-worlds of time, the worldbuilding, the heavy thought put into this reality. Time and multiverses work a bit differently than our run-of-the-mill time-travel stories. We deal with dark forests and multiple branches that loop back in on themselves but all tend to converge in truly horrific ways that are perfectly aligned to make us totally freak out... in the end. Shadow worlds. Popping bubbles of reality. Hopping and erasures and yet... the END OF HUMANITY...

Am I squeeing? Yes, I am.

But wait!
I'm not just squeeing over the SF and Horror side of the novel. This will probably blow your mind.
It's also a great thriller. Not just a truly excellent time-travel novel with a lot more than its fair share of surprises, twists and turns, but it's a full-on excellent modern thriller. Murder mysteries, a full complement of FBI tracking, footwork, NCIS, as well as hopping through time and multiple worlds to meet up with partners, often not in the know, murders before they happen, suspects before they ever get a glimmer of their later involvement in the events that END HUMANITY. Every little murder is a mystery within a mystery within a mystery, and it still has to lead to the meeting on other worlds with strange alien or time-like or nanotech or Dreamtime or Ragnarokian origins. :)

We're all left wondering and wondering and wondering. The author knows his craft. :)

And you know what is perhaps the best part?

The characters. Shannon is awesomely deep and interesting in her own right. As a thriller it succeeds on all these little life-details across the board, perfectly separate from the SFnal and Horror bits. And most of the novel IS exactly this.

I cannot see a universe in which this particular novel doesn't make it ultra-huge. I mean, it has all the elements and high-craft of a super-huge best-seller. As a genre-masher, it's perfectly mainstream and exciting and entirely in line with what people seem to WANT. And it excels at each part! No half-ass aspect anywhere. :)

So I liked it, right?

Oh, hell yeah. :) Hit me out of nowhere and I'm a total convert. :)

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, so I finished this last night but had to gather my thoughts before writing this review. Because the book is one of those that you can talk about for hours with others - both while reading it (discussing theories, puzzling about where the author will take this) and after finishing it (to see if it means the same to you as to other readers).

The story centers around an NCIS investigator, who tries to solve several linked murder cases (a family). It could be a jealous husband, a robbery, some link to the Navy ... anything. However, what makes this so intriguing and layered is that in this world time travel is possible. Only forward and then back to Terra Firma (the actual Here and Now), but still time travel! And space travel too (the base for the time travel branch of the Navy is on the Moon). Anyway, investigators often jump around the time line to find clues and then solve a crime. This gets complicated by the fact that not too long ago, the Navy found out during one of the jumps that the end times (an event called Terminus) are near ... and approaching through time, coming closer at an increasing rate. The Terminus reminds one of horror movies à la Pandorum or Event Horizon what with the dark colours of that cold and snowy world, people losing their minds and being crucified upside down and whatnot. But is there a connection between Terminus and the murders? If so, what is it? And will all those efforts to prevent Terminus actually work - can they?!

Yes, one has to pay attention to which period the MC is currently in as well as how the events play out in order to get hints at who some characters are. Because jumping forward in time will only get you to ONE POSSIBLE future. It's not written in stone, which further complicates things. Nevertheless, although details are different, a few things stay the same, have a necessary common ground so to speak.

And all this is just the set-up!

The rest of the book slowly unfolds several mysteries that are intricately intertwined; a very intelligent plot with several twists and turns. It was so much fun following the clues and establishing theories (I actually used my notebook *lol*), then dismiss them in favour of new ones.
A few things were as I had expected them but there was always some detail that played out differently than anticipated and like I usually say: the journey is even more important than the final outcome.

The writing style is also very enganging, with a host of unique characters that make you feel the entire range of emotions a human being is capable of feeling. Is anyone ever truly innocent? What defines "the good guys"? Every (crime) scene was laid out in detail so the reader becomes part of the investigative team while also being appalled or horrified. You can feel how much you're running out of time so there is NEVER a moment of rest, the story keeps throwing elements at you and you either sink or swim, getting completely drawn into these worlds. The atmosphere, especially in certain surroundings, had me on the edge of my seat or barricading myself with pillows, it was that creepy-good.

I would have never even heard of this if it wasn't for Tyler voluntelling me to this buddy-read and although I will never officially admit it, I owe him because this has become one of my favourite books!

[Sylvain Neuvel · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a word: Whoa! Edge-of-your-seat crime fiction that bends both time and mind. Think True Detective meets 12 Monkeys. Throw in the end of the world and you can begin to imagine where this gut-twisting tale will take you. This is cross-genre fiction at its best.

[Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a moment Courtney’s death had made horrifying sense, had an identifiable cause, a reason. But the pieces slipped apart. There was no center, no reason. Courtney’s death was random, banal viciousness inflicted by one organism upon another. There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.

The Goodreads description sums up the plot of The Gone World pretty well. In a 1997 in which space travel and time travel exist, NCIS investigator Shannon Moss is called in to investigate a crime scene involving the family of a man who was believed lost years earlier on a time-traveling mission. In order to try to solve the case, she travels into the future to learn more quickly what will ultimately be uncovered about the crime. Instead she learns that this crime appears to be connected to the Terminus, an unexplained, Earth-threatening phenomenon that seems to be moving from the far future backwards in time towards the present.

But what’s missing from the above descriptions is a sense of the enjoyable strangeness of the story. The Gone World is an unusual mashup of a police procedural novel and a time travel story. Shannon’s backstory—a criminologist haunted by the murder of her best friend when they were teens—is unremarkable for a crime novel but quite unusual for the lead in a time travel book. There are a couple of ideas here about the mechanics of the time travel—that traveling forward sends you into merely one of the infinite possible futures, that other people and objects can be brought back with the traveler—that are interesting and uncommon but also vital for the story being told.

It’s also rather somber and dark, with the grittiness of a noir crime story. Time travel here is not a very happy process. It requires sacrifice because you’re continuing to age while you’re away. There’s also a particular risk of discovery that leads to a distrust of everyone encountered in a possible future. It all adds up to characters that are often flawed and sad, sometimes just altogether broken, and a book that is more character-driven than a typical time travel story. The scenes involving the Terminus are cinematic yet disorienting at the same time. The story is full of unsettling references to Norse mythology, and the book as a whole has the general vibe of a crime movie like Se7en or a crime tv show like Hannibal.

The Gone World is a more complex, original story than I expected. But the disparate threads are all brought together and resolved very satisfactorily by the end of the story. It’s not an easy read, but it is a good one. Recommended.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book took me 6 months to read because perhaps I’m too dumb to understand this book. That’s the review.

[Chris Berko · Rating 5 out of 5]

This will probably end up being my favorite read of the year. Right from the beginning I could tell I was going to like it. There are certain movies, for me ones like Reservoir Dogs, Boogie Nights, Memento, and Donnie Darko, where I knew before they even ended that they were going to be good, something special and that's what this book is like. Awesome the whole way through and everything is explained in easy enough terms that if anyone else that I knew tried to explain to me what was going on I would look at them like they were crazy. This is truly a unique experience and exceeded my expectations in every way.

[Mogsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum https://bibliosanctum.com/2018/02/01/...

The Gone World follows protagonist Shannon Moss, who belongs to a top-secret division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. On paper, her job is to investigate any criminal activities involving members of the US Navy or Marine Corps, but behind the scenes, her duties involve a whole lot more, including traveling through time to search for clues in a myriad of possible futures. It’s dangerous work, and years ago she even lost her leg to frostbite while on an assignment exploring the wintry landscape of a future Earth.

Moss’s “own” time is 1997, the year she receives a case to track down a missing teenage girl named Marian whose mother and brother have been brutally murdered. The main suspect is a former Navy SEAL, who Moss discovers, with some shock, was part of the Naval Space Command program, stationed aboard a spaceship assumed lost on a classified mission. Knowing how the stresses of traveling through space and time can push a person to the edge, Moss suspects a deeper connection. Now she will need to jump ahead to a possible future Earth to see if Marian’s disappearance has made any ripples, so that Moss might trace the events backwards to discover what happened to the girl.

But for a while now, the NSC has also been aware of an event known as the Terminus, which will bring about the end of the world and all reality as we know it. The date of the Terminus, however, is not set; every time Moss makes the jump to the future and returns to the present, she receives news that the Terminus has moved up a few more years, drawing ever closer.

This novel is a sci-fi crime thriller with time travel thrown into the mix, so you just know the story will be a little wild. It can also be quite confusing—but again, that’s almost par for the course when it comes to time travel fiction. Everything is connected somehow, and as readers, we must keep track of the times Moss travels to the future, how long she stays, the people she talks to, and the information she gleans. Just to make it even more complicated, every time Moss jumps forward and comes back, the future she visits “blinks” out like it never happened (or maybe that should be “will never happen”?) and anyway, all her futures are possibilities only, not certainties. If your head isn’t exploding yet, there’s more: Echoes. These are individuals brought back from the possible futures, doubling someone already living. This aspect plays a big role in the story, so I won’t say more on the topic. The point though, is that The Gone World is a story of many different components, which Sweterlitsch juggles like a performer spinning plates on sticks, trying to keep them all up in the air and moving at once. If you’re not prepared to have your mind twisted, of if you’re in the mood for something lighter, then this is not a book for you.

This is also the second novel I’ve read by the author, so to some extent, I knew what I would be getting in terms of the tone of the story and writing style. In a word, it’s dark. Really dark. Like Sweterlitsch’s first novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow, we’re talking an extremely bleak worldview, where the threat of the Terminus is always present and encroaching on our minds. Some of Moss’s memories and her disturbing visions also have the quality of a nightmare, and the prose frequently utilizes imagery that is once painfully beautiful and viscerally horrifying.

As much as I enjoyed this novel though, there are a few caveats. The raw, gritty, and depressing mood aside, I’m not sure the book got its ultimate point across successfully. The story might have lost its hold on me at the end, crushed by the weight of its own ideas and growing a little too unwieldy for the plot structure to support. As well, I still have no idea how a lot of the science or the mechanics behind the technology in the novel really work; the author doesn’t make much of an effort to explain. One can argue all that is secondary to the main story, but I think it would have helped to get at least some background on the secret NSC space program and the history of how time travel was ultimately achieved.

But all in all, I enjoyed this. It’s smart, imaginative, and so edgy it could cut. I liked following our compelling protagonist, watching all the pieces come together (and sometimes get torn apart) against a backdrop of drama, action, and thrilling suspense. I would recommend this for time travel fiction fans and sci-fi mystery lovers, especially if you’re looking for a challenging, mind-bending read.

Audiobook Comments: Brittany Pressley was a wonderful narrator, successfully portraying a large cast of characters of different ages, different backgrounds, and different times. She used accents to great effect for several of them, creating a very immersive experience for the listener. She had a great voice for the book too, perfectly capturing its grim and dark tone.

[Magdalena aka A Bookaholic Swede · Rating 4 out of 5]

If there is one book that I feel inadequate to review, it's The Gone World, because it's so mind-blowing fascinating and sometimes a bit too much for my little brain to take it, but at least I think I grasped most of what was going on in the book. Still, it's hard to review that left you with a feeling of exhausting, wonder and dread.

Within two months of her arrival in Virginia Beach, she had time-traveled to the Terminus of humanity and sailed the farthest reaches of the Andromeda Galaxy, bathed in starlight that wouldn’t touch Earth for another two and a half million years.

The book is gorgeously written, and at first, there is a tiny feeling of hope in the story, despite, the gruesome murder, as we learn more about time travel, and all the wonders with it. Then, we learn about Terminus, the end of humanity, an end that is closing in faster and faster, from being a threat generations away to a threat that seems to move faster towards each day and you start to feel that humanity may be doomed that there will be no way to stop Terminus from happening.

The Gone World is a fabulous science fiction book and I felt a craving for more books like this after finishing it. I've always loved time travel, and I loved the idea of going forward to an "if" future to see back to how for instance a case would be solved, and then go back. It's not a new thought, but adding the Terminus, gives the book a sense of doom, a sense that nothing will, in the end, stop the end of humanity. There is hope, but will Shannon Moss, be able to figure out a way to stop Terminus? Or is she just fighting windmills?

I feel that part of me is still processing this book, despite that, I finished the book a couple of days ago. It's such an extraordinary book. I also loved how the author quoted August Strindberg, from the book The Ghost Sonata, as intro quotes for new parts in the book. Love details like that. And, I need to find time to read or listen to Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Tom Sweterlitsch!

Read it, or listen to the audiobook. I have a tendency to do both when I have the chance, reading at home listening at work. Btw that's a great way to get some reading done when you don't have time. Combine listening with reading. *A tip from a Bookaholic Swede*

And some people had left their bodies entirely, had become immortal, living as waves of light - but once they could no longer die, the immortals begged for death, because life without passage of time becomes meaningless. It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.

I want to thank G.P. Putnam's Sons for providing me with a free copy through NetGalley for an honest review!

[Cindy Burnett (Thoughts from a Page) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4 stars

I struggled reading this book and am struggling writing the review. I loved the concept of the story but didn’t totally love the execution. I am always intrigued with time travel, and I felt that the portion of the book dealing with that was fabulous. Sweterlitsch clearly researched and thought through that concept and executed it very effectively. What I didn’t like as much was the length (the book would have benefitted from significantly more editing), the intricate scientific detail and the overly complex plot. I felt I had to be hyperly focused on the book every time I read, or I would lose track of the various story lines. Overall, The Gone World is an interesting and original tale that you must be prepared to devote your entire attention to as you read it and not spread it over too many days. It is also contains several fairly gory sections. I had to skip over those. Thanks to First to Read for my copy. All opinions are my own.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time travel gone very wrong

What if time travel was under the onus of the navy with all its attendant problems which every branch of the service has? If there were a problem, would all the members of the team be able to act honorably? Or would we (the people of earth) be in deep trouble? These are the questions asked and answered by this intricate and multifaceted glimpse into a future in which the honor of a few could spell the end of a planet.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

WTF? I have no idea what went on in this book - and I am willing to consider that it's a bit over my head but really...

there is murder mystery wrapped in a time-travel paradox wrapped in a pending apocalypse all a jumble. I kept reading hoping for it to make some sense but alas I ended the book with a big HUH?

[Debbie Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5, rounded up. RTC.

[Liana Gold · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️ 4.5 ⭐️ This book is like a play of chess—a sword fight with multiple probabilities where every decision has consequences. The story is that of a play between humanity and superior intelligence, where the existence is a matter of chance, of probability while the infinite futures become the observed present. Mind bending, isn’t it?

Special agent Shannon investigates a murder case that ties to a space ship that is lost in time/space. Her time traveling uncovers a catastrophic event in the near future called “The Terminus” (aka human crucifications) that is approaching the Earth and threatening humanity. The Terminus is marked by QNTs (quantum-tunneling nanoparticles) that are extra dimensional. They live in the human cytoskeleton, reading the humans’ mind. They can switch off a humans consciousness, like a whiff of anesthesia. It’s a terrifying event that seems to occur in every possible near future that Shannon travels to and is moving on up closer to the “present” time. If Shannon doesn’t find the answers to preventing The Terminus, everyone she knows and loves will die.

As Shannon is investigating the present day murder, she uncovers more disturbing facts that are connected to the murders she was a witness to in her near-future time travel. It becomes like a guessing game of who is the killer and I bet you’ll never guess! Not only is Shannon responsible for deciphering the murders but she also must find their connect to the larger omnipotent force at hand.

The sci-fi novel turned into murder mystery/crime thriller is a perfect blend of cosmic horror, suspense and time bending concepts. There are multiple version of the same people in multiple futures, known as echoes, and it gets so twisty your mind will be spinning from all the information that Sweterlitsch throws at you. Alternative realities and converging timelines will turn the ending into an apocalyptic one.

The creativity of the novels direction and use of time travel gave this book a gritty edge. Books like The Gone World elevate the genre and take it to new levels. I’m not sure why Sweterlitsch hasn’t written anything else since this book release (2018) but I’m patiently awaiting the release of this novels movie adaptation.

[S · Rating 1 out of 5]

I kept reading, waiting for it to get better (hoping!)... and then it was over.
Dang.

This book had some interesting concepts - the time/space travel, the freaky particles. But there were just too many flaws:
~How did she never run into herself?
~It was just too implausible that you would be expected to go live an entire separate life for however long you wanted, in the course of an investigation... this was beyond deep cover, and yet there seemed to be no standards around it. She also didn't seem to follow any rules or regulations, which made for a not-very-plausible law enforcement character.
~Was it trying to be a horror story too? Or was it just poorly put together? Sometimes the violence made sense, but it was often just gratuitously gross.
~Character development was weak. I understand that we are all less consistent than we believe, but it sure seemed like the same character was a completely different person depending on the timeline she was in.
~The evil corporations and greedy politicians were at fault for the world ending. Cliche.
~And most of all: how/why would alien particles care what religion you were? That as the reasoning behind the twisted forms of torture just made less than no sense to me.

There are too many better books with similar elements to waste your time on this one!
Try:
The Mythago Cycle by Robert Holdstock - These are fantasy rather than SF, but they really get to the whole recursive reality thing in a way that this book never achieved.
The Fold: A Novel by Peter Clines - gets to many of the same ideas as in this story, but MUCH more entertaining.
Sleeping Giants by by Sylvain Neuvel, if you are looking for similar technology and protagonist , but with more of an alien bent.
And lastly, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, for a good exploration of the dark side of alternate realities and alternate selves.

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.0 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/TK6ITg3Q_SM

I know so many people who adore this book, so I hoped I would love it as well. Unfortunately I found it very… average.

The story started as a very traditional thriller novel. Thankfully I know there was a speculative element coming but I was surprised how long it took for those elements to kick in. The reveals were decent but honestly nothing mind blowing.

To be clear, I didn't dislike the book. I found it average, which is reflected in my rating. I just don't understand the hype.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

At some indeterminate point in Earth's future, two suns will appear in the sky. One of them is a white hole which will cause the Terminus, at which point all human life on Earth will cease (or at least cease to be relevant). Special Agent Shannon Moss is with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Part of her work involves going on dangerous time traveling missions to a point in the future in an attempt to determine the cause of the Terminus and to prevent it if possible. She also investigates naval-related crimes in her present day which is 1997. While investigating a triple homicide and the disappearance of a teenaged girl, Shannon must travel into the future to complete her investigations which are somehow linked to the Terminus.

This is a sci fi crime thriller. It involves the quest for immortality, nanotechnology, time travel and a lot of acronyms. The book is vastly confusing, the science seems sketchy, I have no clue how this time travel was supposed to work and the epilogue caused my head to explode (and not in a good way). Nevertheless, I really liked this book. I thought it was really strange, imaginative and well written. It will make an intriguing movie. This is the second book I've read by this author and I hope to read more.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time travel, multiverse, murder mystery and horror weaved in a story about the end of humanity. Even if the subject sounds like a well worn one, it isn’t. TS created an original world, time travel is seen in a new light and the ouroboros cycle is masterfully used as a base theme.

I was hooked from the prologue:

“Please,” she said, “go back. I’m down there, please go back, don’t leave me—”[…]
“You have the wrong body,” she said, remembering that she had somehow seen herself in the orange trainee space suit crawling along the tree line. “You have to believe me, please. I’m still down there. Please don’t leave me—”

It was one hell of a ride. I loved the theme, how the events unfolded, the journeys through the multiverse, the worldbuilding. And I hated the dark atmosphere and the violence of the killings. Too much violence for my taste. It was both a great and an oppressive reading and it felt this way mostly because we experience all first hand through the eyes of Shannon Moss, the main character.

Check also the following interview with the author – it explains some of the concepts in the book which are quite interesting to see where they emerged from: https://medium.com/adjacent-possible/...

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this quite a bit. The narration was terrific, but the story got a bit convoluted along the way. That said, I'm pretty sure I followed the threads all the way through. This was a good science fiction/time travel/police procedural novel. The time lines and "echoes",(IFYYK), andthe pathways through the trees all made this one a unique read.

*Thanks to my local library for the free audio download. LIBRARIES RULE!*

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a well-written sort-of SF novel that I have mixed feelings about. The downside is near-constant violence, graphic gore, mass murder, mass suicide, mixed mass murder and suicide…. Oh, and the end of the world as we know it. I’m not a horror fan, and there’s enough gore here to drop my rating to 3 stars, if not lower.

The upside is pretty cool, well-thought-out sfnal concepts. This is a multiverse novel. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) uses “time travel” to alternate futures, to investigate past crimes some years later. I’m not sure if the author’s scheme would “actually” work, but it’s plenty good enough for fiction. And the author has gone to some effort to make his stuff scientifically plausible: https://medium.com/adjacent-possible/... (thanks to Claudia for the link). The writing style is contemporary literary fiction. This is 4-star stuff.

The viewpoint character, Shannon Moss, is a NCIS agent investigating a gruesome mass-murder of the family of a Navy deserter. You won’t like the gore if you have a weak stomach. She’s well-drawn, a driven professional with an interesting history and life — which gets very convoluted with her side-trips into alternate futures. I had trouble keeping track, and the author’s habit of slipping in nicknames of characters made it harder. Or this may just be my poor reading retention?

Things get even weirder with the Vartogger trees, thin spots in the cosmos; hanged men in the trees; “echos”, multiple copies of the same person (or object) from nearby time-lines; misfires of the B-L starship drive that may be causing the White Sun.... He ends the book with an unconvincing “do-over” epilogue. Not quite “I woke up and it was all a dream,” but getting there.

So, overall: a 3-star book for me. Maybe 3+ in retrospect. Worth reading, but too gory, dark and confusing for me to really enjoy it. Definitely not a comfort read! But I'd read something else by him.

See Mogsy’s perceptive review for the details https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gone World is a breathtaking journey of literary imagination. Beautifully written, deeply layered, and most importantly mind-boggling. It’s a procedural detective story about a NCIS investigator Shannon Moss looking into a brutal bloody murder of a family in a house where her best friend from childhood had once lived. But, it’s not just any police procedural because Moss is part of a secret program whereby the investigators can inject themselves into the stream of time and space seeing what the future has wrought.

Time travel is always interesting and here it’s downright fantastic. Yes, there are two paths you can go by but it’s not too late to change the road you are on. Indeed, there are infinite paths into infinite futures which becomes quite maddening. And, not to be left out, besides murder, mutiny, space travel, time travel, alien life forms, conspiracy, time paradoxes, and more, it’s the story of the impending end of the world and whether it’s destiny or alterable.

Richly textured, thought-provoking, detailed, and crazy-making, The Gone World is simply awesome.

Many thanks to G.P. Putnam for a copy of the book for review.

[Kameron Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unreservedly five stars. I would have gone a different direction with the coda/epilogue, but hey, that's why I write my own books. This is a masterful book with quantum futures that made my head ache in the best way. What an astonishing writer. What a triumph.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this because of the story that Neill Blomkamp is adapting it into a film, as well as the fact that Sweterlitsch has served as co-writer on a number of Blomkamp’s Oats Studios projects. I mention this first because The Gone World, being pretty high-concept sci-fi, is not the kind of novel that would have appeared on my radar otherwise. Thankfully, Sweterlitsch is a first-rate storyteller, and though the plot is complex I found the narrative fascinating.

Explaining the premise is going to make me feel ridiculous, but I’ll have a go. NCIS agent Shannon Moss is part of Deep Waters, a top-secret project involving travel in space and time. One can only jump forward in time from their present day or 'terra firma', in Shannon's case 1997 – but not beyond the Terminus, 'the moment humanity ceases to be relevant'. Every timeline ends in the Terminus sooner or later, and, ominously, it's getting closer. The futures Shannon and other agents visit are only possibilities and may never happen in reality, but an agent might live for years in an 'IFT' (inadmissible future trajectory).

Back in 1997, a family is massacred, and the prime suspect is the patriarch, a Navy SEAL who was also part of Deep Waters. Shannon is tasked with solving the case, and is perturbed when she finds the crime took place in a house that used to belong to her childhood best friend. The story has been described as 'Inception meets True Detective'; there's more than a little X-Files in there as well (not least because Shannon watches the show and is a Scully fan). Boiled down to a sentence, it's a time-travel whodunnit (so, Crime Traveller, basically.)

The 'gone world' the title speaks of is not, as you might think, one of these IFTs, but Shannon's past, in particular the life she shared with her best friend Courtney Gimm before the latter's death at age sixteen. Touching the wall, she felt like she could tear the present world away and see her friend again, be with her friend as if no time had passed, as if she could step into the old bedroom, the gone world. The device of grounding Shannon's motivation in Courtney's death works really well, both because it humanises the character and because it keeps bringing the story back to a recognisable context. No matter how outlandish the rest of it becomes, there's always this element of ordinary humanity.

It's safe to say The Gone World is outside my reading comfort zone, but this was a gamble that paid off. It's very well paced, and while everything was explained, I never felt like I was getting bogged down in the intricacies of how it all worked. Turns out, murder mystery and time travel go surprisingly well together.

(There's one thing I hated about it, though – the epilogue. I hated that epilogue so much I don't even know how to begin talking about it. Let's pretend it never happened.)

I received an advance review copy of The Gone World from the publisher through Edelweiss.

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[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very long way to a decent ending. There were only 2 ways the author could go by the halfway point & I didn't think he'd take option 2, so it just became a long trek to finally get to the point which was increasingly obvious. If I'd liked the main character more, it wouldn't have been such a slog.

I should have liked the character. It wasn't her fault she was given such a crappy role to play. I had a lot of trouble believing the current & future scenarios for a few reasons. First was the lack of public knowledge of such a big space program, including a moon base. The public has telescopes & a great interest not to mention too many people were involved. Second, the lack of support in the future scenes made no sense. Third, there was too much & yet not enough reliance on what she found there.

Most of all, I didn't really care for the whole idea that everyone KNEW they would die if she did. I didn't like the idea when it first came up, but once it was finally acknowledged that 'echos' could move between 'ifs' or parallel dimensions, then it made no sense at all. Agreed, it's tricky, but I just finished reading Dark Matter where it was handled much better.

Anyway, it was well narrated & a decent story, but way too long especially the last half. The setup was done & once the story started to be revealed, the author needed to move the story at a fast pace, not leave me with too much time to pick out all the inconsistencies.

[Metodi Markov · Rating 2 out of 5]

Много ми беше трудно да навлезна в историята, почти сто кървави страници въобще не ми беше ясно, за какво аджеба иде реч...

Средата ме увлече, за да стигна до един объркващ и някак нелогичен за мен край. :(

Втората звезда е за пътуването във времето и пространството, както и за извънземните и планетата им. Много ми хареса и арта на корицата, можело значи!

Цената на знанието често е твърде висока...

P.S От тази книга научих за един много интересен ренесансов творец - Ханс Холбайн Млади и за неговата доста смущаваща творба, "Мъртвия Христос в ковчега".

[Jack · Rating 5 out of 5]

First spoiler-free review of 2019! Huzzah!

Holy hell…what a way to start the New Year! The good news is that The Gone World is an amazing creation, well worthy of the praise it is receiving, and is a “must read” for sci-fi fans. The bad news is that the bar has now been set awfully high, and I think I’m going to have a difficult time finding books this year that grab me and affect me like this one has.

One of my favorite things about Goodreads is that I frequently come across books on friends’ feeds that I might never have heard about otherwise. I have a rather large love/hate relationship with social media, so I don’t always keep up on what’s hot or new or getting underground buzz. I prefer to find most of my reading material organically, not necessarily following an author’s every update or note about a project. And I generally tend to avoid books that everyone else seems to be reading at that time. If I’m ahead of the curve on something popular, then great. But if there’s something getting a lot of buzz, I’ll generally avoid it until the furor has died down.

And this one fits that bill, having come out a year ago and getting some solid accolades. Yep, I’m a little late to the party, and I truly couldn’t be happier.

As with all my reviews, I will attempt to keep spoilers to an absolute minimum. I truly despise major plot spoilers, and honestly feel that books (and movies, and music, and…) just have more impact and are more enjoyable when you go in without preconceived notions or expectations. And with books like The Gone World where there are so many twists and discoveries and branching plot points, to make any mention of them would lessen the impact of the work as a whole. So if it’s not mentioned in the official book synopsis, and if it has the possibility of revealing some major plot point, I’ll do my level best to avoid mentioning it here.

So what can I say about The Gone World that won’t give something important away? Well, I can say that in the 30+ years that I’ve been reading science fiction, horror, fantasy, and thrillers, I have never encountered a book quite like this one.

Though it is ostensibly a sci-fi novel (though more speculative vs. hard sci-fi), there are enough other elements that it really is more of a fiction thriller with science fiction elements as the core conceit. You want some mystery and a little bit of whodunit action? You’ll find it here. Do you like both physical and psychological horror? There’s some of that here too. Want a little romance sprinkled in amongst the mind-bending twists and turns? Voila, it’s yours.

In truth, I have a hard time recalling another book that I’ve read where all of these disparate elements and genres have been blended together so seamlessly. Tom Sweterlitsch has done a truly remarkable job of creating a completely unique tale, including creating his own fresh take on time-travel, which is one of the more perilous sci-fi notions for an author to tackle. The Gone World is also equal parts plot driven AND character driven, and as such feels like a completely cohesive narrative, without any part getting subsumed by another.

I placed a sheet of Red Roof stationery beside the picture and wrote in black Sharpie, LIFE IS GREATER THAN TIME.

At the center of The Gone World is Shannon Moss, an agent for NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service). Though the narrative switches from third-person to first-person at times, she is the only POV character throughout the whole book. Fortunately, she is an engaging character, courageous and driven, but fallible and too trusting at times. I always have an easier time relating to characters who are depicted as imperfectly human, with human flaws and fears, instead of perfect Molly Sue characters with no inner conflict. Give me characters who grow, learn, make mistakes and then try again. Fortunately, Shannon is very much imperfect, but she refuses to give up. It’s that determination that gets her through some truly rough times, including receiving a physical impairment that impacts her everyday life.

But given the fact that she is a time-traveler for the Navy, she has to be mentally fit and flexible, as time-travel in this story can cause severe psychological strain. Even with that mental fortitude, Shannon has a bit of world-weariness that I always gravitate to with protagonists. I feel a certain sort of kinship with people who still do the right thing, even though they may be exhausted and near the end of their rope. It’s that hopeful doggedness that I admire, and Shannon has it in spades.

Death is an unshared intimacy, Moss would sometimes think, finding a center of calm in the science of the morgue. Death and loss close company for her, her best friend dead, her father gone.

Though this is Shannon’s story, there are plenty of supporting characters to help expand the narrative, and since this is a time-travel tale, some of them are recurring through the time-periods that Shannon visits. Each supporting character stands out, and they are all part of the narrative for a reason. Nobody is included just for color, and I admire the fact that Tom Sweterlitsch obviously gave each character a lot of thought beyond their basic characteristics.

”Shannon, we’re all echoes here.”

Yes, there is an overarching threat that is driving much of the action in The Gone World, but the actual antagonists are human, and they are rendered with realistic motives and beliefs. Nobody here is superhuman. Like most good storytellers, Tom Sweterlitsch understands that the biggest monsters can be people, especially the people we least expect.

That said, this isn’t really a story about good vs evil. Yes, there are some human mysteries to solve, including a murder case that is very near and dear to Shannon’s heart, but The Gone World is more a story about fate and choice, and the fight to alter the course of the future by changing the present. Like I mentioned earlier, this is not the standard “change the past to fix the future” time-travel story. In fact, there is no going to the past in The Gone World. What has happened has happened and can’t be changed, and I really enjoyed this fresh take on a well-worn science fiction trope. But beyond the unchangeable past, even the futures that Shannon travels to aren’t concrete. Every future she visits is a possible future, because once she’s traveled there and then returned to her present, called Terra Firma in the story, she is not the same person. She will now make different choices based on what she’s seen and experienced, which means that the future she just visited will no longer exist. Honestly, it’s just a very logical and well-realized version of time-travel that actually makes sense. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t want to give away any of the finer points. Needless to say, there’s serious consequences associated with time-travel, and it doesn’t always work out well for the traveler.

There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.

One of the things that Tom Sweterlitsch absolutely knocks out of the park is how he brings all of the divergent plot threads together. From the gripping opening chapter that establishes the tension that pervades the whole book, to the present day murder mystery that has strange ties to Shannon’s past, and all of the various futures she visits and people she meets, everything gets tied together at the end of the story. Some of the converging plot points can be a little convoluted, so this is absolutely a book that you need to pay attention to. No skimming allowed here. Even the smallest sentence or shortest paragraph can include a little plot tidbit that helps tie things together.

This is also one of the most “human” books I’ve read in a bit. Fear, failure, and broken hearts are never glossed over. The side effects of time-travel manifest in a realistic manner. Our characters experience guilt, doubt, and desperation, but it’s always handled in a way that is believable and pertinent. Human beings are complex and contrary, and that is captured perfectly in The Gone World.

”It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.”

Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that I found absolutely no grammatical errors or wonky sentences throughout the entire book. This is likely testament to both Tom Sweterlitsch’s writing prowess as well as rock-solid editing. That said, Tom does write with a different style, one that might not be for everyone. Admittedly, it caught me a little off guard at first. But, that said, it’s perfectly readable and perfectly acceptable, even with its unique cadence and vibe. But if you can get past that, then you are in for a wonderful tale that is beautifully told.

Just be aware that the ending is somewhat ambiguous, which I think was perfectly in line with the tone of the book, but some readers may have a hard time with it.

At the end of the day, the elegant writing coupled with some truly fresh ideas culminated in a book that I found to be completely enjoyable and refreshingly original. Even with the New Years holiday and all the associated travel, I still managed to burn through this one pretty quickly. It’s rare anymore for me to find a book that is “unputdownable”, but this one accomplished that feat and then some. Even if science fiction isn’t necessarily your cup of tea, I think this one transcends the science and can be accessible to anyone, regardless of favorite genres. Definitely add it to your TBR!

[Brandon Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Damnit, I just typed out a huge review for this and it disappeared 😂

In lieu of typing all that out again, here’s this:
The Gone World was an amazing scifi thriller with plenty of horror elements throughout. We follow a detective as she tries to solve a gruesome murder by traveling to different timelines in the future, all in hopes of stopping an inevitable apocalyptic event known as The Terminus.

It was a surprisingly grim and gruesome read; There’s lots of pretty graphic violence and disturbing imagery throughout (I thought the looming apocalypse was simply terrifying), but it was very thrilling and compelling and I just couldn’t put it down once I got into it.

Highly recommend!!

[exploraDora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have literally no idea how to review this book. It's so mind bending, at times I felt the need to google an explanation. 👀😂
Gonna come back and try to review this properly.

[Liz Barnsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is totally insane and will mess with your head in so many ways but it is also unique, brilliant, mind boggling and hugely thought provoking.

Time travel novels are often convoluted but I don't think I've ever read one with this level of complex intelligence where both nothing and everything makes sense. With every new timeline the author adds richness and vibrancy to the plot, our main character Shannon Moss engages you in her mission with a nervy, edgy focus, her purpose being to prevent The Terminus..an apocalyptic event that ends humanity and is in every possible future. And its getting closer...

Beyond that I'm not even going to attempt to explain the premise...you have to live it, a beautifully crafted mix of imagined science and humanity that is hugely addictive, presented pitch perfectly and I'd probably one of the best novels written whether you end up loving it or not.

A book I bought on a whim and has ended up being one of my favourites in years.

Highly recommended.

[Paul Ataua · Rating 3 out of 5]

A science fiction ‘thriller’ in which the hero travels forward in time to bring back clues that will help solve a present day crime. The time travel twist lies in the fact that the future is part of Everett’s multiverse and is, therefore, just one of many possible futures, which means she can never be sure if there is value in the things she discovers or if things will turn out that way. To complicate further, the one thing that is seemingly present in all the futures is a pending apocalypse. Fascinating premise, such an interesting concept, but I just felt all the complications led to it lacking real pace. At no time did my bottom reach the edge of my seat. More stimulating than exciting!

[Marianna Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need to process this before I review it...
But, damn, that was really good!