The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
⛺ Introduction:
I picked up The Gone World as my December sci-fi read. This was my first experience with Tom Sweterlitsch's work, but the book came highly recommended on the Reddit rabbit hole I was in, so I thought, why not? Now that I’ve finished it, I’m glad I gave it a chance. That said, I’m not entirely sure how to categorize its genre. It contains horror imagery and plenty of sci-fi elements, yet at its core, it’s a murder mystery story.
🦸🏼♀️ Characters:
🧑🏼🚀 Shannon Moss: Shannon is the main character of the story. She is a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent who is part of a secretive division that deals with time travel. The story starts with her investigating the brutal murder of a Navy seal’s family. The Navy seal (Patrick Mursult) is the suspect for killing his family
👩🏼🦱 Marian Mursult and Patrick Mursult: Marian only surviving member of the family, and she is missing. A big portion of the story is Shannon and others looking for her. Patrick is the Navy seal and he is the prime suspect for killing his family and abducting his daughter Marian
🛸 Libra ship crew: One of the space ships humans sent to the outer space, Libra, discovers an alien planet contaminated with some sort of absurd technology. They are called Quantum tunneling Nano-particles that penetrate human bodies and make people go mad. These QTNs follow the ship to Earth and destroy our planet. This apocalyptic event is called Terminus. Patrick was a sailer among Libra
🧨 Hydlekrugger is the big bad villian, who is seemingly killing people for no reason (or is there a reason?). He was aboard a ship called Libra that encountered some weird alien life form and the world was doomed since.
🚀 The story:
The story is set in 1997 and feels reminiscent of a Christopher Nolan movie, particularly in its imagery and complexity. While the first two acts are relatively straightforward, the third act becomes a real challenge to follow. At its core is the mystery of Marian Mursult, who has gone missing and is suspected of being abducted by her father, Patrick Mursult. To advance the investigation, Shannon Moss travels 20 years into the future to gather critical information about Marian’s whereabouts.
In this world, time travel works in a fascinating way. Travelers visit what’s called an Inadmissible Future Trajectory (IFT) — a potential version of the future. However, events in an IFT "blink" out of existence as soon as the traveler returns to their original timeline. Shannon’s mission is twofold: (1) uncover what happened to the Mursult family, and (2) find Marian Mursult, if she is still alive.
As Shannon delves deeper, she discovers a darker, more intricate connection. Several deaths tied to individuals associated with the Libra spaceship come to light. It becomes clear that the Mursult murders are just one part of a far-reaching and sinister conspiracy. Racing against time, Shannon pieces together clues from the IFT to save lives and uncover the truth. All of it ties back to the ultimate apocalypse known as the Terminus.
The Terminus, it turns out, is linked to Libra, a spaceship launched by humans in the 1980s. During its deep-space voyage, the Libra encountered a planet harboring QTNs (Quantum Tunneling Nano-particles), which triggered the chain of events leading to the Terminus on Earth. The murders Shannon is investigating are deliberate attempts to sever the connections that enabled Libra’s fateful journey and brought the Terminus to humanity. Someone is traveling through time, methodically killing humans in an attempt to dismantle the chain of events that lead Libra to the alien planet
This time-traveling figure is Hydlekrugger. Shannon realizes that his actions — as horrifying as they seem — are intended to save humanity from annihilation. To him, sacrificing a few lives is a necessary evil to prevent the ultimate destruction of Earth. But Shannon refuses to accept this as the only solution. She is determined to find another way to stop the apocalypse which feels like such a certainty. At the end she realizes (what Hydlekrugger. didn’t understand) that the world they live in is a IFT of Libra and to save the world she must destroy the ship. If the ship blinks, the whole world blinks, and it would be like Libra never found the QTNs. There still a possibility that some other ship will find the alien planet that, but it is only a possibility and not a certainty. Shannon likes those odds.
I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a hard sci-fi thriller.
