Time travel, with all its mysteries, can be very complicated to understand. There have been many books and movies that portray time travel, and The Gone World is one of these books. Tom Sweterlitsch’s Gone World follows NCIS agent Shannon Moss as she tries to stop the Terminus, an alien entity that threatens to consume the world. In order to do this, she bounces back and forth between different timelines, IFTs, and time knots, which allows Sweterlitsch to explore some big themes and raise some interesting philosophical questions about apocalypses.
One interesting theme Sweterlitsch plays with is the consequences of our actions. One he raises in The Gone World is how much do our decisions affect our future in the face of time? Moss is a resilient character who is gives up almost everything for the sake of the mission. Her decisions in the novel are centered around her mission. Of course, she has the advantage of seeing her decisions play out in the future because she can time travel. We sympathize with her as she struggles to face the alternate futures that have been created, especially when we see Nestor shift from her lover to her enemy.
While we may not have a time machine to take us into the future to see how our decisions play out in our future lives, we have history and the cruel lessons we learn from life. In terms of history, I am reminded of First Nations where we killed an entire culture and people group all for the sake of making money. I am also reminded of how mine owners in the Appalachian regions strip mined the forests, leaving behind ugly scars and cancerous water for the people who live there. I recall all the systems of racism that were created in the not-too-distant past continue to oppress people of color. Overall, I look back on history and see how we have placed profit over people time and time again. They say if you do not learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. In reality, those of us who are fortunate enough to have access to history and information are some of the few who may have a chance to change the future.
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