Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World is a mystery, sci-fi thriller that follows Shannon Moss on her criminal justice journey to figure out what happened to murder victim, Marian, ultimately driven by the trauma of losing her best friend, Courtney. She is so good at her job that she’s invited to join a secret project involving space and time travel, an ultimate mission to find where Terminus begins to avoid the end of humanity. Terminus is a complex idea in the novel, but it represents the end of humanity brought on by the onslaught of QTNs which break down the composition of the human body into geometric shapes of another dimension and eliminate all life. Shannon witnesses these decaying events in several IFTs she visits, but the novel reveals three ways that suggest time travel is an incredibly dangerous idea. 1. The future is not singular.When thinking of the benefits of time travel, I could easily see a common response of visiting the future to gain knowledge of a lucky event to change the outcome of the present, like winning a lottery ticket. Shannon reflects on how she “imagined time travel as something concrete, that knowing the future would be as certain as knowing the past...imagined that knowing the future might help me cheat at something like the lottery, seeing winning numbers before the numbers were ever pulled.” But we quickly discover the complexities of time travel in this novel, and winning the lottery is still quite impossible as winning it in the present without time travel capabilities. "I imagined time travel as something concrete, that knowing the future would be as certain as knowing the past...I imagined that knowing the future might help me cheat at something like the lottery, seeing the winning numbers before the numbers were ever pulled." Whenever Shannon does travel to the future, it takes place in an IFT, which only represents one possibility of the future. This is another reason why discovering where Terminus begins is so difficult, because every time a character discovers a new Terminus, it throws off the investigation even further without knowing if it will certainly happen or not. Not to mention that every time someone enters an IFT, Terminus grows closer to the present in Terra Firma. The novel even shows Shannon visiting several IFTs, depicting different versions of 1997 and 2015 with horrifying depictions of possible futures with Aryan rule and terrorist attacks. Time travel comes with many rules in this novel, as well. I would feel quite comfortable staying in Terra Firma because I would be too afraid of breaking the rules and inevitably destroying the past. It’s very complex, but I think Shannon’s motives for using time travel to redeem Marian’s murder and save humanity are pretty bad ass. 2. Life without time is horrifying.In one particular IFT, Njoku described one particular Terminus where “immortals begged for death, because life without the passage of time becomes meaningless. It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.” These immortals in particular were the ones who lived privileged lives inside ancient pyramids, living like kings, Njoku describes. This idea suggests that living life in complete luxury without any obstacles or tribulations is completely meaningless and not worthwhile. It also suggests that meaning in life is found through overcoming struggles, as Shannon has seen many times in her life. It’s disappointing that the entire novel is essentially an IFT once we get to the epilogue and found out that she’s younger in a new, reset Terra Firma, because that means that everything she had to overcome never happened, and the ending is truly a happy ending—or rather, a happy beginning before the entire novel started. "Immortals begged for death, because life without the passage of time becomes meaningless. It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death." 3. The present is no more stable than the past or the future.Throughout the novel, Terra Firma is described as the present where all return to after coming back from an IFT. I seriously doubted the idea of stability in this book, especially established in a concept like Terra Firma, since it felt like time and all the plot lines were very twisted and unstable. Supposedly, “only the Present is real, only the Present is terra firma.” Which is even further complicated when Shannon discovers how to reset Terra Firma to 1986 before she loses her leg and even before Courtney dies. I think what Sweterlitsch is ultimately trying to critique about time is that it is anything but stable. In this novel the past primarily correlates to trauma that cannot be undone and the characters must live with the actions since Terra Firma, no matter what kind of time traveling they do. The past though can still prove unstable because of memory. Memory distorts the concept of time and what we remember. The present is also unstable because it is impacted by so many decisions of others we cannot control. The present feels like the time period where we have the most agency of controlling, but it doesn’t give me hope unless change is a collective choice, especially how the narrative of climate change has evolved in the last 200 years. And the future has always been unpredictable and infinite, which is a pretty universal standard in most novels. In the context of surviving apocalypse, time allows characters to heal and overcome battles, while trying to cope and survive in the present with the hope of looking forward to another day. These connections are the foundation to Shannon’s character and her motivations for making time travel decisions in the novel. If time travel does become a real possibility and plays out like it does in this novel, I will be quite happy to stay in the present.
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AuthorCreative writer + professional & technical writer. TWD enthusiast. Archives
April 2021
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