Review: The Gone World

 After reading There is no Anti-Memetics Division, I went to ChatGPT Pro and asked for other books like it that I might have missed over the years. It gave me a bunch of books I'd already read, as well as books I'd already bounced off of, but one book that hit was The Gone World, published in 2018 and apparently won a few awards but somehow never got my attention.

The book revolves around Shannon Moss, who is an investigator for crimes related to the navy. The background and backstory is heavy on science fiction, however, positing that the Navy had discovered a way to traverse both deep space and time. The rules of time travel are as follows:

1. You can only travel forward in time, but not backwards in time.
2. Jumping ahead in time grants you access to a universe that hasn't happened yet and might never exist. Each forward jump therefore gives you a unique universe, that may never be repeated.
3. Returning to your own time, you aged normally depending on how much time you spent in the universe you were in. You can bring back information or people (the latter is rare), but none of the evidence is admissible in court.

What's happening in Moss' experience is that there's a world extinction event in the future, which causes the death of humanity. What's disturbing is that that extinction event keeps getting closer and closer into the future. But that's not her job. Her job is to investigate crimes, and one multiple serial murder is happening, at which point she gets involved.

Given her affiliation with the navy, she gets to jump forward in time to get an idea of what happens. At this point the story flips back and forth between being a crime thriller (will she rescue the girl in time), complete with an insane serial killer villain, and a science fiction time-travel story (can we save the world). For many books and writers this would be too hard to mix together, but somehow this story works. We get recurring characters, visiting them in multiple timelines, some of whom are victims and some of whom become villains. Moss herself at one point discovers that she might have caused the death of one of her friends due to her using an identity while time traveling.

The book is impressively well plotted, though there are a few plot holes, and the ending was great (the post-ending was anti-climatic, but appropriate). This is a great book. Not as good as There is no Anti-Memetics Division, but still excellent and well worth your time.