Nov 2025 BotM - Infinite Drift > Likes and Comments

This month's winner is Infinite Drift by Brent Hartinger

“It’s a tank full of warm water. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Seventeen-year-old Ollie is out with his best friends on a Saturday night, and they decide to try the “sensory deprivation” tanks at a store called Infinite Drift.

But when he gets out again, the world seems vaguely… different. And it feels like he’s being watched.

Could he have somehow crossed over into a different dimension? Or is he going insane? After all, he’s still distraught over the death of his little brother eight months earlier — an event no one knows he accidentally caused.

Ollie tries to "reset" things by going back into the tank. This time, he emerges into a world where the Yellowstone "supervolcano" erupted four years earlier, almost wiping out human civilization, and one of his best friends is dead.

But Ollie’s little brother is alive again.

Unfortunately, Ollie is being watched — by the robot-like creation of a cosmic monitoring station left in operation by a civilization that died out eons ago. And the being is ruthlessly trying to eliminate a strange "disruption" in the Ollie!

And so he has no choice but to go back into the tank yet again…

Infinite Drift is the latest book from Brent Hartinger, the author of the LGBTQ teen classic Geography Club, but it’s unlike anything he’s ever written a page-turning mind-bender with a bonkers bisexual love triangle.

Content warnings for (view spoiler)[ death in the family, violence, homophobia, dysptopian (hide spoiler)]

Making a comment so that I can find this later! I plan on starting this on Friday

Okay! That gives me time to see if my library has this book

Sounds good! And if I forget to reply, feel free to remind me! I also wanna get better about my buddy reads!

Will do!

Thank you!! Im gonna download this to my kindle now so that I will be ready and not forget!!

My review:

I'm not usually a fan of dystopian or near-dystopian scenarios (particularly right now) so I think there was some inner stress that drove me through parts of this book faster than it deserved. This is a fascinating ride with our main character, Ollie, who is hanging out with two friends, trying to fight his own depression and stress. His brother Dylan died recently in a skateboarding accident, and his friends know that. What they don't know - what no one but Ollie knows - is that he feels responsible for goading his younger brother into trying a dangerous trick that went wrong. Ollie believes he effectively killed his brother, and he's drifting, unable to connect with his life over the combination of loss (including the divorce of his parents) and guilt and secrecy.

Then, in a random moment of impulse, Ollie tries out a sensory deprivation tank. And when he emerges from it, the world is just slightly different. Only in small ways - his best friends are still there, his brother is still dead. But words, facts, minor details have changed. And that launches Ollie on an adventure of seeking a world where his brother is alive and all is well. Except that's not what he gets.

There is tense emotion and action as Ollie moves forward, with a shadowy antagonist on his heels. The scenarios are imaginative, and his reactions feel plausible. I liked that his bisexuality, and his on-and-off attraction to both male and female friends, was a fairly minor sideline to the quest/dystopian story. I loved Matilda and the role this new friend played across scenarios.

This feels more like SciFi than fantasy - the multiverse theories are presented like potential facts, but it is very accessible with no real hard-science underpinnings. We don't get big emotional closure at the end, but the story wraps well enough. And perhaps encourages us to make the most of the timeline we're in.

This sounds like such a heartfelt story! I cannot wait to start reading this