The Gone World

By: Tom Sweterlitsch

Narrated by: Brittany Pressley

Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

Inception meets True Detective in this science-fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind....

“I promise you have never read a story like this.” (Blake Crouch, New York Times best-selling author of Dark Matter)

Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family - and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship USS Libra - a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows firsthand the mental trauma of time travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.

Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.

Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.

©2017 Tom Sweterlitsch (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

One of the A.V. Club's Top 10 Books of the Year 2018

One of BookPage's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2018

“The Gone World has already created quite a stir. . . . The book probes questions about consciousness and crime that call to mind, among others, True Detective and 12 Monkeys.” (EW.com)

"I like to be freaked out and mystified simultaneously. The Gone World, a gory time-travel thriller, does both in surprising ways....Inception meets True Detective, but it also contains elements of Solaris, Interstellar, Twin Peaks, Minority Report, and even Stargate. To all this, it adds some innovative time-travel shenanigans." (The New Yorker)

Good writing, excellent narration but awful plot

The writing and imagery were well done. Narration was great. However, the story line was not something I enjoyed. I found the ending annoying.

review

Good narration though often difficult to follow the chronology of the back-and-forth time travel with alternate realities and a less than clear understanding of the plot.

Hard Boiled Time Travel

Tom Sweterlitsch has written an absurdly complex, hyper violent, deeply disturbing SciFi Noir, brilliantly performed by Ms. Brittany Pressley, whose command of character & nuance is remarkable. I ended the book completely baffled, yet thoroughly entertained. It’s brutal. It’s surreal. It’s weird. Very much for fans of Richard K. Morgan style savagery.

Very unique timeline but easy to follow

Crescendo pacing. Vivid characters. Dramatic and emotional. Razor-edge science and philosophy underpinnings. Strong female character. One heck of a detective story through time and space.

Wow, twisted, but with such believable characters

Ok. This is a thriller mixed with some serious sci-fi. I truly enjoyed the narrator's performance. in my mind, she brought the lead character, Shannon Moss, to life for me. Her style is straightforward, just as I imagined Agent Moss to be.

There were a couple of complaints in other posts about the difficulty in understanding the sci-fi plot points of the story. I can see that. It's not a standard Hollywood simplistic idea. I found there to be some nuance involved. That's ok for me. It added a bit of mystery and complexity. So, without quite understanding the finer points, the story still works for me.

I find Sweterlitsch's descriptions and observations to be insightful. He's not filling space or time. Everything hangs together. I did not sense anything superfluous. I did find myself actually wondering how Agent Moss was going to proceed. I felt her uncertainties, doubts, and struggles. For me, this was a story that I haven't experienced for years: well told, believable characters in unbelievable circumstances, unknown futures that I can't predict using work out tropes and cliches.

Granted, I'm a stupid simpleton. Your mileage may vary. I found "The Gone World" to be a refreshing and original work, and I look forward to reading more works by Sweterlitsch.

Interesting story poorly read

The reader has a halting unnatural way of reading which is quite annoying but eventually you get used to it. The story itself is more horror in the beginning, murder mystery in the middle, and sci-fi towards the end. But it kept my interest.

Grim, Brutal and a Little Hallucinatory

The Gone World is rich in Multiverse imagery-- a vivid and fascinating trip. It is also unrelentingly brutal and graphically violent. Choose your poison!

Time travel done well.

Liked it so much I’m about to listen for a second time. Hoping that the second experience will result in even more depth and appreciation of this complex and entertaining time travel action tale.

Twisty, smart, and thrilling

I loved this book and couldn’t stop listening or reading. The alternate history and how the author did that just blew my mind. The scientific aspect toward the end got a little hard to follow but after a second read it made sense. Fantastic.

Exquisitely dark time travel story

A riveting and spiraling story of time travel and complex cause and effect. The narrator was especially excellent. Someone give her whatever the Academy Award equivalent is. You might find as I did that the middle section of the book drags just a bit, but hang in there because it all comes back for multiple payoffs by the end of the book.