The Gone World

It's hard to describe the plot of this book. It has elements of a murder mystery mixed with starship travel in both space and time. There is also the coming destruction of Earth as what is called the Terminus is working its way back from the future ever closer to the present set in 1997. As the main character, a one-legged female member of a special branch of the space faring navy, looks into the brutal slaying of a family and a missing teenage daughter of the family, it is slowly revealed how this case has ripples through space and time that connect the case to the origins of the Terminus. The plot becomes quite complicated as the main character slips between 1997 and decades into the future looking for answers. She meets many of the same people at different ages but with different storylines. Can she trust the version of the future she travels to for answers? What is sure is that everywhere she goes a bloody trail of bodies is left in her wake. An interesting but brutal Sci-fi story.

I have never read anything remotely like this book

An overwhelming rollercoaster of sadness, violence and time-travel. 

I will be thinking about this book for a long time. I will be thinking about Shannon Moss. I will wonder at the possibilities in her life, the branching roads mapped out, hypothetical and real. This is the best time travel book I've ever read, the best mystery (simply because it has so many, unfolding like a rose), the best book about spaceflight and the apocalypse and sacrifice. Is anything really the end? The world keeps changing, blossoming, blooming. Everything is beautiful and simultaneously terrible. Time is an uroboros.

While this is undeniably a genre novel, it's also very much an adult contemporary novel, and I think it bridges the gap wonderfully, of interest for both crowds. If you like detective stories, stories about serious women solving serious crimes, this one's for you. If you like twisty pulpy benders with inexplicable unreality, this one's also for you. I am so glad I read this book.

I'll be thinking about the ending through all the recursions of my life, the echoes and the branching paths. Other reviews of this book compare it to Twin Peaks and True Detective. The prose does have a Lynchian flair for the bizarre, and the murder mystery is as gruesome, sad and violent as the first season of True Detective. However, it reminds me far more of the X-Files (in terms of setting, characters and location), Arrival (in terms of atmosphere), and perhaps the first season of Westworld (thematically, with its questions of personhood, the ravages of time, and the themes of impossible futures).

Yet the ending reminds me of nothing so much as Inception's ending-- something meant to be discussed, curled eternally in ambiguity. Yet unlike Inception, the entire book sets you up not to doubt every truth, but to experience and enjoy the multiplicity of endless conflicting truths, each equal and legitimate. In an age of 'mindfuck' twists and 'ending EXPLAINED' youtube diatribes, I find this extremely comforting. This book is not meant to be analyzed or picked apart (though not for lack of depth; the world of this story is as well-built and detailed as any of its more pulpy fantasy or science fiction contemporaries, while still being effortlessly understandable to anyone even glancingly familiar with the last 20 years of American history). The entire book could perhaps be seen as an effort to condition readers to accept dubiety; there are no easy answers. The journey is more important than the destination; time is a beauty meant to be experienced.

It doesn't matter if you're real. Be at peace. Keep going. Someone else would quit.

I feel like the author doesn't really understand the science behind his concepts or base it on something real, but the take on time trial was kinda novel. I wasn't a fan of one of the revelations at the end because it made me feel like I wasted my time reading this, but as I write this review I've just thought about how this revelation and ultimately the resolution at the end of the novel is very similar to what happens in the TV show Dark which I think is masterpiece. So I guess it's the journey that makes the difference and I didn't really find it as compelling as in Dark. The book is really well written though and has this haunting undertext woven through in descriptions of scenes. Overall I think within time travel media this book is probably solidly middle of the pack.

Also this blurb:

“I promise you have never read a story like this.” —Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter

Phenomenal book. Tom's prose is engaging and rich. The story drives hard and doesn't let up. I love his world building and how he's sprinkled the 80s and 90s so authentically into his story.

Based in western Pennsylvania in 1997, Shannon Moss, a clandestine agent of the NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) is investigating a murder of a Navy SEAL's family. The SEAL was also an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra, a ship assumed lost in “Deep Time.” Moss herself, seeks clues by traveling roughly 19 years into the future aboard these special ships seeking clues. When she returns, she returns to the same moment she left, but she's aged by however long she spent in the IFT (Inadmissable Future Trajectory) – she goes on multiple trips. This investigation turns up some very gory murder scenes, some serious violence, and some baffling weirdness caused by time-travel shenanigans. The story has some very cool SF ideas, but sometimes I found keeping track of who's who a little difficult. And wow, the author really puts his protagonist through the wringer. It's a bit bleak (an end-of-times scenario is also worked into the plot), but I was interested to see how it all plays out.

Good plot and had some good action twists. It felt a little dragged out in some chapters throughout the book. I got the most impatient towards the end and began to skim the pages.

This is one of the very few truly original time travel stories that I've read - at this moment, in fact, the only other one that comes to mind is Neal Asher's wonderful Cowl.

The Gone World is ... an utterly engrossing read. After a slightly brain-twisting opening, it moves into the familiar-seeming territory of a murder mystery / hunt for an apparent kidnapping victim, and if that had been the whole book, the setup and main character of Shannon Moss would have been plenty to hold my interest and for me to enjoy the book.

Instead, it veers into a wonderful blend of detective fiction and time-travel tale with the threat of an ever-encroaching inexplicable apocalypse... and going in, it's better not to know any more than that. Suffice to say, this is a good solid piece of crime fiction, populated by some well-written and memorable characters, blended with an outstanding scifi novel. If any of that sounds good to you, this is a must-read.

Love the whole murder mystery time travel horror weird bits, but frankly I became lost late in the game and never found my footing.

Read. This. Book.
Can't recommend it enough.

i wanna live in the roving pyramids and make all my slaves carry me while i have orgies.

Excellent book combining a gruesome mystery and time travel. I love time travel books so much, and this one did it so well!

I???ve been leery of any blurb that says ???X meets Y??? to describe a book, so I???ll admit that I wasn???t so sure about what I???d get when I chose to dive into this novel because the blurb said it was ???Inception meets True Detective.??? Hell, I haven???t even watched True Detective yet so IDK how that comparison even works. Good thing I decided to just ignore that and go with the flow, because this really is quite the creepy novel. Sci-fi and horror play well together in the hands of a capable author, and this novel???s a great example of how awesome that mix of genres can be when the writer nails the mix just right. The only downside to this book is the ending: falls flat, does not take advantage of all that momentum leading up to it. That aside though, this was really fun to read, and would likely translate well onscreen, big or small.

The Gone World is an insteresting thriller with time travel elements and some bits of horror.

What is not is the marketing's salad combination of Inception, True Detective, 12 Monkeys, Interstellar, and The Silence of the Lambs.

I see how this book can appeal to those who enjoy the aforementioned movies, but it is definitely not all those things combined or even separated. It has nothing remotely close to Interestellar or Inception. Probably some bits of True Detective, but that's it. It also does a disservice to the book because I think it can stand by itself without being hyped with those blurbs.

Anyway, the story here is that of an officer from the NCIS who is sent to solve a case that involves murder and dissapearance. In the process, she finds herself traveling to the past and to many futures, trying to find answers to unraveling mysteries. This includes the end of the world, a different version of herself, etc.

An intriguing sense of gloom and doom is present throughout the whole story, captivating the reader with what could possibly be the resolution.

The book does a good job wiring paradoxes and blending thriller with Science Fiction elements.

Definitely one of the best surprises of the year. A year full of dull SF stories.

A well written and complex story, but for some reason I found it oddly disturbing.

It's excellent. Definitely ‘Inception' meets ‘True Detective'. One of the few books that I would consider re-reading.

The Gone World is a science fiction mystery that follows Shannon Moss, an NCIS special agent, through a high-stakes murder investigation spanning over 20 years. Shannon Moss is not just an NCIS agent, she has also been trained to travel through Deep Time to the future. When she is called in to investigate the murder of a sailor's family and his missing daughter, she is pulled into a complex web of secrets that threatens to unravel the world itself. She must get to the bottom of the mystery before it's too late.

While the premise of The Gone World is interesting, the book never really grabbed me. Some parts were a little slow and others were confusing, which distracted from the overall plot. However, the characters were interesting and many parts of the story were quite engaging. Fans of time travel fiction will probably enjoy The Gone World.

3.5 stars. I started off really liking this book and the murder mystery that the protagonist attempts to solve by traveling to the future. The murder investigation falls to the background as the science fiction theme ramps up. The SF aspect ended up being about 75% of the story and this made the plot a little confusing and less enjoyable for me. The story was fast-paced and the writing was good. Recommended for those who are looking for a science fiction read more than a straightforward mystery.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital review copy of this book.