‘The Gone World’ explores hideous darkness without end
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Of all literary genres, science fiction is the most adventurous. Done right, it is capable of speculating confidently about humanity’s future with conviction born of pure imagination. On a more modest level, it can limit itself to interrogating our potential in the here and now with the precision of a surgeon. What science fiction isn’t in the business of doing is doling out assurances that all will be well.
In “The Gone World,” Tom Sweterlitsch’s second novel following the destruction of Pittsburgh in his sci-fi noir “Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” the future is far from reassuring — in fact, it is a horrifying extinction-level event that is no longer content to wait for us to catch up with it in the 27th century.
Readers get their first glimpse of what is referred to as “Terminus” through the eyes of Special Agent Shannon Moss, a 22-year-old recruit to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who is seeing things in her journey through time and space she can scarcely comprehend:
“Everywhere she looked, in every direction, she saw the frost blanched sky and snowy ground cross hatched by fallen trees. There were two suns — the pale disk of the sun she knew and the garish white
radiance of the phenomenon her instructor had called the White Hole. This was once West Virginia.”
Until recently, Moss had been an ordinary young woman from Canonsburg plucked from the secretarial pool of Buchanan Ingersoll at U.S. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh by a senior instructor from the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) who spotted her potential as a resourceful investigator of uncommon crimes.
In the opening chapter, Moss, freezing and numb with cold, stumbles upon a group of naked people who have been crucified upside down and suspended above a dark lake in West Virginia. In her delirium, Moss spots a familiar face among the crucified — her own. But before she can alert her rescuers to the existence of the “other” Shannon Moss, she is whisked away by colleagues who want to get away from 2199 as fast as the extra-dimensional thrust of their time-traveling spaceship can carry them.
The wonderful thing about “The Gone World” is how it successfully operates on so many levels: It is a hard sci-fi story about an impending apocalypse as it moves through time from the future to the past, which happens to be our unsuspecting present. But it is also a complex murder mystery in which Shannon Moss, beaten and bloodied in several space/time zones and various iterations of the future, has to put together the clues that will reveal those behind a series of murders while also, paradoxically, preventing them.
While attempting to head off a massacre committed by men driven to desperate measures by their encounter with Terminus, Moss also uncovers clues to what happened to her best friend from childhood — a girl who was murdered when they were both in high school. The murder influenced the trajectory of her life.
There are so many twists in “The Gone World” that the reader may be forced to scribble in the margins just to keep track of shifting characters and plot. Mr. Sweterlitsch, a Greenfield resident, knows his way around theories about the multiverse and time-slips. Fortunately, he never loses sight of the imperative to entertain even while expanding our contact with science’s cutting edge.
Everything sounds credible to non-astrophysicists, but not everything is graspable at first, especially in the later chapters, where a certain amount of exposition is necessary just to untangle the paradoxes readers have encountered over nearly 400 pages. Plot outcomes aren’t predictable. Meanwhile, don’t be alarmed by an abrupt switch from thirdperson to first-person narrative. Mr. Sweterlitsch knows exactly what he’s doing.
To say more about the plot is to give away too much of the conceit of Mr. Sweterlitsch’s very engaging and terrifying novel. Despite a few opaque passages that hinge on a deeper understanding of time paradoxes, it is very accessible because it feels like familiar genre hits, especially the first season of HBO’s “True Detective.” Shannon Moss will definitely remind readers of FBI agent Clarice Starling in Thomas Harris’ “The Silence of the Lambs.” Mr. Sweterlitsch clearly engages the sort of dread we encounter when reading the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and Ben Winters’ “The Last Policeman” novels.
The movie rights to “The Gone World” already have been picked up by Neill Blomkamp, the celebrated director of “District 9.” Mr. Sweterlitsch and Mr. Blomkamp already have collaborated on several mini films, but “The Gone World” will be their first major studio effort together.
While undeniably grisly at times, “The Gone World” also is a novel of ideas including the persistence of faith, both ritual and personal in the wake of an absurd, creeping apocalypse. With trembling fingers, I was relieved to get to the last chapter but never quite let my guard down. That’s the sign of a damn great novel.
Mr. Sweterlitsch will speak at City of Asylum @ Alphabet City, North Side, at 8 p.m. Tuesday. The event is free; RSVP at www.alphabetcity.org.