Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World introduces a concept we have not seen before on our apocalyptic reading list – time travel. The novel follows NCIS Special Agent Shannon Moss as she is tasked with solving the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family and his daughter’s disappearance, but this mission leads her to face “The Terminus,” or the end of the world. The novel presents a much more scientifically inclined story than what I have seen in apocalyptic literature with its IFTs and QTNs. However, even though some of the science in The Gone World is difficult to wrap my brain around, I still found it an enjoyable, if harrowing, read.
So, what is an IFT? It is an Inadmissible Future Trajectory, or a possible future timeline. These are what Moss explores when she travels to the future during her investigations. Nothing from the future is set in stone, so these timelines cannot be treated as such. But this also means that theoretically, the future can be changed, which is what Moss is trying to do in preventing the Terminus. Unlike anything she had seen, the Terminus only seems to come sooner to and sooner the more she time travels to stop it. Essentially, both the reader and Moss discover that the Terminus is unescapable once it is set into motion as it has been. That QTNs, or Quantum Nano Particles, will ravage the Earth once they reach it. That the world is going to end and there is nothing anyone can do… Maybe. All throughout the novel we see Moss’s determination and perseverance, so when she discovers a possibility of preventing the Terminus, we know she will take it. A ship, the Libra, that was previously thought of as lost in Deep Time in space is responsible for leading the QTNs to the Earth and the only way to stop it is to destroy the ship. Moss fights her way to the Libra and does just that: she destroys the ship and saves the world from inevitable doom. This is where everything you think you know about the story is challenged. Upon destroying the Libra, Moss finds herself back in her original timeline where her best friend, Courtney, was attacked and killed. This time, however, Courtney survived the attack. We find out that everything in the novel up to this point was an IFT and child IFTs created in the event that Courtney died. Essentially, everything that we read didn’t happen. This twist is mind-boggling, and it took me probably too much time to figure out. Sweterlitsch completely undermines the expectations surrounding an ending for a story like this. There is no celebration that the Terminus has been defeated. There is only the Libra and Moss being devoured by a black hole before we are thrust into the epilogue where the Moss we knew never existed. The Moss in this timeline is pregnant and hoping to get married. No one is aware of the Terminus or QTNs, though time travel has still been invented and presumably is still being used by the NCIS. But this all makes me wonder if the Terminus was truly prevented. I think that is definitely a possibility, but not a certainty. How can we be so sure that something else will not happen to trigger the Terminus? That some other ship will not encounter the QTNs and lead them to Earth? Do the QTNs even exist in this timeline? If they do, the only difference now is that nobody knows about them, which is all the more terrifying for the fate of the world. For further reading on this topic, please visit: Mystery Tribune: A conversation With Tom Sweterlitsch About "The Gone World" Space.com: Time Travel: Theories, Paradoxes & Possibilities npr: Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible Without Leading to Paradoxes
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AuthorHi, I'm Brooke! In these blog posts, I will be reflecting on content in post-apocalyptic literature. Archives |