The Gone World
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 bestselling 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 U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand 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.
“I promise you have never read a story like this.”—Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling 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 U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand 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.
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Community Reviews
3.5. Mostly riveting read in spite of unbelievable premise, occasional unnecessary flowery prose, and terrible epilogue.
I wanted to read this book forever. It sat in my list for years while other books made it to the top. Recently though, I've been trying to clean up my backlog and figured I'd give this one a shot.
...it should have stayed in the backlog.
On paper, this book should be awesome. It takes place in the 90's, X-Files gets mentioned a bunch, it includes time travel and gun fights and re-writing events through time travel, it all sounds great. Its execution is just done poorly.
I'd say the book had me really invested for about 60% of the time. Towards the latter half though, it almost seemed like the author couldn't figure out how to end his book. By the time the ending came around, they wrapped up this intricate time travel story in a couple pages. I can't go into it because of spoilers, but this one event that has been talked about the entire book takes place. This event single handedly set into motion the entire tragedy of the novel...and it's over in a few pages with characters glossed over and people making decisions that go against everything you know about the character.
Long story short - not a good book. 2 stars because it had promise and kept me invested for a bit.
Also - don't listen to the audiobook version like I did - the narrator is horrible and has two types of reading voice, disinterested and world on fire.
...it should have stayed in the backlog.
On paper, this book should be awesome. It takes place in the 90's, X-Files gets mentioned a bunch, it includes time travel and gun fights and re-writing events through time travel, it all sounds great. Its execution is just done poorly.
I'd say the book had me really invested for about 60% of the time. Towards the latter half though, it almost seemed like the author couldn't figure out how to end his book. By the time the ending came around, they wrapped up this intricate time travel story in a couple pages. I can't go into it because of spoilers, but this one event that has been talked about the entire book takes place. This event single handedly set into motion the entire tragedy of the novel...and it's over in a few pages with characters glossed over and people making decisions that go against everything you know about the character.
Long story short - not a good book. 2 stars because it had promise and kept me invested for a bit.
Also - don't listen to the audiobook version like I did - the narrator is horrible and has two types of reading voice, disinterested and world on fire.
I'm conflicted about the ending of this book.
I really enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the way the time travel worked and I enjoyed the sort of twist that actually everything up until that point was an IFT and just destroying the Libra and causing the singularity would blink that IFT out of existence. What soured me, and it's kind of stupid, but it bothered me that that at the end, Shannon is just a pregnant teen, dreaming about marrying her best friends brother. All of her potential lost so that she can just repeat her mother's mistakes? That's disappointing.
I really enjoyed the book and I enjoyed the way the time travel worked and I enjoyed the sort of twist that actually everything up until that point was an IFT and just destroying the Libra and causing the singularity would blink that IFT out of existence. What soured me, and it's kind of stupid, but it bothered me that that at the end, Shannon is just a pregnant teen, dreaming about marrying her best friends brother. All of her potential lost so that she can just repeat her mother's mistakes? That's disappointing.
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