Monday, December 2, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch




The Gone World is a science fiction mystery thriller which has a tag line on Amazon as "True Detective" meets "Inception."  My experience in reading books with such taglines - X meets Y! - is that these taglines are quite often badly misleading and sensational, but The Gone World actually kind of fits the tagline to some degree - this is a mystery involving sci-fi concepts (time travel and alternate realities essentially) to create circuitous concepts in the vein of Inception at the least (I've never seen True Detective).

Whether the end result is actually good on the other hand is.....a harder question to answer.  The Gone World features a solid main character but little else in the way of interesting characters (due to its very concept changing them frequently), and a SciFi premise that by its nature gets confusing until it lands on a payoff that works, but isn't very exciting.  The result is a thriller that isn't too long, involves some interesting SciFi concepts, but left me at the end with a feeling that was basically just described as "huh" more than anything else.


----------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
The Year 2199: Shannon Moss, in a trip forward through time as part of the Navy's secret Deep Waters program, experiences the Terminus - the end of all life as humanity knows it.

The Year 1997:  Shannon Moss, now a member of Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) called in on cases involving personnel with connections to Deep Waters, is called in to a crime scene: in which a husband seems to have killed his family and absconded with his daughter.  Moss is called in because the husband was actually a former Deep Waters service-member whose ship, the U.S.S. Libra, never returned from its journey through time and space and was assumed lost.  And Moss finds not only a professional connection to the crime, but a personal one as well, with the crime taking place in the former home of a childhood friend who died long ago.

To solve the mystery, Moss will travel back and forth through time, into potential futures, to see how events played out under different circumstances, and to determine the truth behind the Libra's disappearance.  Yet what she finds may be a truth she could never have imagined, and one which threatens to bring the Terminus ever closer to fruition.....
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The Gone World is a book taking place essentially in five parts, with three parts set in the main timeline of 1997 and two parts set in alternate versions of the year 2015, with the book alternating between 1997 and the 2015s, as our protagonist travels into possible futures (which per the physics of the book cease to exist the moment our protagonist or any other such traveler returns back home) in order to investigate things that only became apparent years after the fact.  Each future timeline looks very different from our version of 2015 due to the influence of time travel, and our protagonist finds herself trying to both blend in and discover the truths in those timelines - where one slip up as to her own existence as the time traveler could result in deadly results.

I should mention here that while I introduced this book as a scifi mystery, it's not really a "mystery novel" in any form - the book isn't really about who killed whom or any form of whodunit, but more of a sci-fi thriller puzzle, where our protagonist, and the reader, is attempting to puzzle out what is truly going on as the potential for catastrophe and apocalypse comes ever closer.  That protagonist by the way is Shannon Moss, usually referred to as "Moss" by the book, so I'll do the same here.  Moss is a solid protagonist - intelligent and resourceful but not superhumanly so, with her own traumas from her past, both her past in the Deep Waters program and her personal past growing up with her now dead friend.  But there's very little about her that's particularly special honestly, and none of the other characters stand out in any way either - this isn't a character focused novel and it shows - so I won't talk much more about the characters here.

So the question for this type of novel then is - do these concepts, and the way they move the plot forward, end up working in a satisfying and interesting fashion?  And the answer is in my opinion mixed - I was definitely intrigued at the halfway point of this book, but the way the rest of the book played out caused me some amount of unenjoyable confusion - how the time travel is working at this point of the plot is just unclear to both the reader and the characters, and the explanation that seems to be it for it all might as well just be magic.  And then while how everything is resolved does wind up making sense, it just seems a bit of a let down.  To try and explain without spoiling, unlike other stories with time travel puzzles, even thrillers like that, the ending in this book wraps everything up in a way that doesn't seem to actually "say" anything, and without great characters, that results in an ending that is completely unremarkable.

Some spoilery talk of the last paragraph in ROT13: Sbe zbfg bs gur obbx, gur gvzr geniry jr frr vf ragveryl bar qverpgvbany - punenpgref zbivat sbejneq va gvzr vagb cbgragvny grzcbenel shgherf naq pbzvat onpx gb gur cerfrag jvgu sberxabjyrqtr.  Va gur svany gjb cnegf, gur obbx fhqqrayl srngherf cnegf va juvpu punenpgref naq ybpngvbaf zbir onpx naq sbegu orgjrra gvzr.....naq punenpgref frrzvatyl erzrzore guvatf naq crbcyr sebz cbgragvny shgherf gung arire unccrarq, juvpu frrzf gb pbagenqvpg ubj guvf jbeyq jbexf.  Vg'f n pbashfvat ovg, juvpu qbrfa'g qb nalguvat zber guna whfg zhqqyr gur jngref - vg qbrfa'g znxr gur obbx zber vagrerfgvat ernyyl.

Naq gura gur raqvat - gur ernqre jvyy ernyvmr irel rneyl ba gung Zbff vf va snpg na rpub naq abg gur bevtvany Zbff.  Svar.  Gur ernqre naq Zbff jvyy ernyvmr yngre ubjrire gung gur ragver 1997 cerfrag jr'er frrvat VFA'G gur npghny cerfrag, ohg vf va snpg vg'f bja cbgragvny shgher gung vf orvat frra sebz gur crefcrpgvir bs gur perj bs Yvoen.  Nf fhpu, Zbff ernyvmrf gung vs Yvoen jnf qrfgeblrq, guvf jubyr gvzryvar jbhyq qvfnccrne naq gvzr jbhyq erireg gb jura Yvoen rffragvnyyl ynhapurq, naq uhznavgl jbhyq unir n punapr ng fheiviny guvf gvzr jvgubhg Yvoen va rkvfgrapr gb oevat gur Grezvahf onpx jvgu gurz guebhtu gvzr naq fcnpr.  Nf n erfhyg, gur ragver svany npg vf onfvpnyyl whfg Zbff gelvat gb svther bhg ubj gb qb gung, naq gur "ubj" bs ubj Zbff chyyf gung bss whfg vfa'g cnegvphyneyl vagrerfgvat.....Vg'f arire ernyyl va qbhog.  Fb gur raqvat znxrf frafr, ohg whfg vfa'g cnegvphyneyl rkpvgvat.

So yeah, I'd probably recommend skipping The Gone World: it's....fine, but the characters never stand out, the plot doesn't really do anything particularly interesting with its mechanics, and the book doesn't really say anything about anything, so yeah, it's just okay.
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