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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Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is the first piece of literature besides the graphic TWD novels I’ve read that involves humans living with zombies on Earth. I’ve seen almost every episode of TWD with the exception of the two most recent seasons; I was studying abroad in London during Season 9 and experiencing a pandemic during the delayed premier of Season 10, so keep spoilers away from the comments! With that being said, I have seen the first 8 seasons and may discuss content from what I’ve seen, so you have been warned about spoilers! Besides TWD, my favorite zombie movie narratives include World War Z, I Am Legend, and Warm Bodies, each with unique relationships between both species and cures or lack thereof. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One is similar to Warm Bodies in that there are multiple zombie species with varying abilities. Whitehead splits his zombies into dangerous and rapid skels and slow and sluggish stragglers. The main narrator, Mike Spitz shares accounts from three days in total in the novel, and shares unique insights on relationships with humans who are still alive and between the two zombie species. I found many connections with these zombie works, but I found three in particular that resonated with TWD that made these real-world concepts more real and engaging. “That wall out there has to work. The barricade is the only metaphor left in this mess. The last one standing. Keep chaos out, order in.” When the Lieutenant describes the wall encircling NYC, specifically the island of Manhattan, I immediately envisioned the chaos of so many walls that physically broke in TWD, including the Prison’s fences from a walker invasion invited by the evil Governor, Woodbury’s fall brought on by the Governor’s choice of self destruction, and Alexandria’s first fall invaded by Negan’s crew. All of this destruction is met with zombie forces, but humans are also at fault in every instance, and they are at fault in in ˆZone One, too. It isn’t known what exactly brings the large zombie herd in Zone One’s last Sunday, but the mythology surrounding the wall and it’s falsifying comfort of safety is what interests me, similar to the notion of safety in TWD. In a post-apocalyptic world, safety and comfort is a privilege, and I find fault in the destructive nature of sweeping the zombies out of NYC and cleansing the city of its impact by burning the bodies. While these zombies don’t sound like pleasant species to cohabit a space, they are never given a chance, especially the harmless stragglers. I find ethical dilemmas in eliminating the stragglers in addition to the skels, but Sunday’s ultimate fall is ominous and somewhat foreshadowed in Spitz’ thoughts and internal commentary on the stragglers’ peculiarity as a species and their existence in the same space. “Before the rise of the camps, out in the land, you had to watch out for other people. The dead were predictable. People were not.” I have always been emotionally invested in the human characters of TWD narrative, and emotionally torn when beloved characters like Glenn and Carl were killed. More so, characters like the Governor and Negan were certainly more dangerous than the dead because they were, like Whitehead points out, far more unpredictable than the dead. The first few seasons of TWD reveal how the characters interact with the walkers and survive. As power complexes and tensions rise initially when characters like Shane become wildly unpredictable and display erratic behavior, I quickly became more afraid of the human characters than the walkers themselves. Of course, in mass numbers seen in the seasons with Alpha, those numbers were quite frightening, but the mind control and manipulation that Alpha possessed over her daughter and her clan of followers was more disturbing than any walker.
I can observe similar manipulation of the government using civilians on sweeps to clean the streets of NYC to eliminate the zombie population, keeping the sick and already dead out beyond the wall. Some of the characters even played games with the stragglers and defiled them before killing them, which I found extremely disturbing and despicable behavior. I felt untrustworthy towards a lot of Whitehead’s characters, including the main narrator Mark Spitz simply because the fragmented timelines and flashbacks mimicked a real-life three-day weekend where flashbacks would probably occur. This makes the reading more lifelike of what this apocalyptic world would feel like, but it still made me uncomfortable in the right moments to make me more weary of humans than zombies. |
AuthorCreative writer + professional & technical writer. TWD enthusiast. Archives
April 2021
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