Time Travel is Not a Toy: Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World
It’s about, er, time that time travel books dealt more realistically with the horror of the concept. These are stories that regularly fling people into a situations they don’t understand, often via experimental technology, with the ever-present possibility that they will break reality itself—yet few of them fully explore the true horror of the situation. Time is not something to be trifled with.
The Gone World
Hardcover $27.00
The Gone World
Hardcover $27.00
In The Gone World, Tom Sweterlitsch envisions a world in which human exploration has spread to the furthest reaches of space and time, but the wide range of destinations and the utter weirdness of what’s there to be find out in the “deep waters” injects a vein of horror into what starts out as a sort of sci-fi procedural, elevates the Nordic mystery tone of the central plot. The resulting combination is a compelling if unconventional sci-fi horror thriller.
On a night in 1997, NCIS special agent Shannon Moss is called to the scene of a grisly murder. The prime suspect is a Navy SEAL who seemingly murdered his family and fled the scene, and the crime appears to be tied to a rash of bizarre homicides and suicides, all the perpetrators linked by their service onboard the Libra, a spaceship exploring “deep waters” (deep space and time travel). Stranger still is how the victims came to be living in the house of Moss’ murdered childhood best friend, or why the details of the case keep getting covered up and shifted around by her superiors. Moss, who has access to alternate pasts, presents, and futures through the same technology found onboard the Libra, tries to piece the clues together, but as present and future events become tangled, both she and the shadowy figures surrounding the Libra begin to grow desperate to save their own existences. Yet despite their best efforts, their actions seem destined to bring about the end of the universe, a time known as “the Terminus.”
Time travel in The Gone World is dark, and it’s dark in a way that fits the tone of the novel. While the idea that time travel is not to be toyed with isn’t exactly a new concept, Swelterlitsch takes it to its most terrifying conclusions by making the eventual end of humanity (and possibly the entire universe) an integral part of the setting, even while leaving it a mystery to be pieced together through subtle offhand hints peppered across various alternate histories. Where does the government’s use of medical nanites and prosthetics from various branches along the timeline fit in? What about the mission of the Libra, whose fate plays a huge role? And then there’s humanity’s always reliable capacity for self-inflicted horror: since no one quite knows how things work out in the deep waters, all the antagonists are merely trying to survive in the best way they know how, resorting to monstrous deeds in an effort to slow down the eventual approach of the Terminus.
It’s been said that the only thing worse than someone who knows nothing about a subject is someone who knows very little. In The Gone World, the villains play this out to horrifying effect, torturing and murdering people they believe are already dead or otherwise unreal while they make their own moves to delay the end of the world. The heroes are no better, given that the best defense against the approaching calamity is an evacuation plan using the same ships that it’s theorized might help cause the Terminus in the first place. Due to the forking of possible futures, time can be changed, which just gives everyone the motivation to try to fix things. Usually, they make things worse instead.
While Nordic mystery-meets-cosmic horror-meets-The Time Machine might not be to everyone’s taste, it’s certainly for mine.
The Gone World is available now.
In The Gone World, Tom Sweterlitsch envisions a world in which human exploration has spread to the furthest reaches of space and time, but the wide range of destinations and the utter weirdness of what’s there to be find out in the “deep waters” injects a vein of horror into what starts out as a sort of sci-fi procedural, elevates the Nordic mystery tone of the central plot. The resulting combination is a compelling if unconventional sci-fi horror thriller.
On a night in 1997, NCIS special agent Shannon Moss is called to the scene of a grisly murder. The prime suspect is a Navy SEAL who seemingly murdered his family and fled the scene, and the crime appears to be tied to a rash of bizarre homicides and suicides, all the perpetrators linked by their service onboard the Libra, a spaceship exploring “deep waters” (deep space and time travel). Stranger still is how the victims came to be living in the house of Moss’ murdered childhood best friend, or why the details of the case keep getting covered up and shifted around by her superiors. Moss, who has access to alternate pasts, presents, and futures through the same technology found onboard the Libra, tries to piece the clues together, but as present and future events become tangled, both she and the shadowy figures surrounding the Libra begin to grow desperate to save their own existences. Yet despite their best efforts, their actions seem destined to bring about the end of the universe, a time known as “the Terminus.”
Time travel in The Gone World is dark, and it’s dark in a way that fits the tone of the novel. While the idea that time travel is not to be toyed with isn’t exactly a new concept, Swelterlitsch takes it to its most terrifying conclusions by making the eventual end of humanity (and possibly the entire universe) an integral part of the setting, even while leaving it a mystery to be pieced together through subtle offhand hints peppered across various alternate histories. Where does the government’s use of medical nanites and prosthetics from various branches along the timeline fit in? What about the mission of the Libra, whose fate plays a huge role? And then there’s humanity’s always reliable capacity for self-inflicted horror: since no one quite knows how things work out in the deep waters, all the antagonists are merely trying to survive in the best way they know how, resorting to monstrous deeds in an effort to slow down the eventual approach of the Terminus.
It’s been said that the only thing worse than someone who knows nothing about a subject is someone who knows very little. In The Gone World, the villains play this out to horrifying effect, torturing and murdering people they believe are already dead or otherwise unreal while they make their own moves to delay the end of the world. The heroes are no better, given that the best defense against the approaching calamity is an evacuation plan using the same ships that it’s theorized might help cause the Terminus in the first place. Due to the forking of possible futures, time can be changed, which just gives everyone the motivation to try to fix things. Usually, they make things worse instead.
While Nordic mystery-meets-cosmic horror-meets-The Time Machine might not be to everyone’s taste, it’s certainly for mine.
The Gone World is available now.