The Gone World

The novel is set in 1997 on an alternative Earth. It is very much like our Earth of that time, but there are differences caused by alien contact. The aliens offered humans the plans to develop interstellar spaceships that could travel into the future.

Shannon is a detective who works for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. She is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy Seal’s family, whose daughter is missing. She discovers the seal was an astronaut on the Libra, a timeship that went missing. This leads her to catch a ride on a timeship into the future to see if she can discover where the daughter is and uncover the truth of what happened.

The novel starts as a police procedural, then turns into a thriller with horror elements, and finally becomes full-on science fiction. The story has many twists, such as Shannon discovering she is connected to events surrounding the family’s murder.

The novel uses time travel elements previously used in other science fiction, but new complications are added. Each trip into the future creates a different timeline, as seen from the time traveller’s perspective. The various timelines develop from the moment the time traveller departs from their current time into the future. This new timeline can be very similar to the old one, with only subtle changes or, conversely, have major differences. The timeline differences mean Shannon can encounter alternate versions of people from her own timeline.

The huge difference in this parallel universe treatment of time travel is that as soon as the traveller leaves the new timeline it collapses and never existed. It is a complex novel in places as Moss runs into characters with different agendas who are limited in their actions by the nature of the timelines. In her trips to the future, Shannon also discovers that every timeline has the same threat heading towards Earth. A threat that will destroy it.

Shannon Moss is a tough, determined character who wants to get to the truth of crimes and ensure justice is done.  She is one of the few main characters in science fiction with a disability. One of her legs was amputated after being badly damaged on a mission. The missing leg is augmented by technology, but it still causes her problems and disables her at times. She appreciates zero gravity and not having to use her prosthetic limb in space. The novel’s author, Tom Swerterlitsch, worked for 12 years at the Carnegie Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. This could have inspired him to have a person with a disability as his main character.

The novel is a slow build peppered with horrific events. It becomes more engaging as the time travel elements become more integral to the plot.  However, it became slightly disengaging when Moss decided she was not the original Moss but a duplicate. The reasons for Moss thinking this are unclear until an unnecessarily belated reveal. Nothing is gained in the narrative by the delay.

The novel concludes with a bit of a time travel cliché, but one which most readers should find satisfying.

Tom Sweterlitsch’s prose is somewhat dense at times. It contains many details about investigation procedures, indicating that the author probably did a great deal of research or is a fan of crime fiction. His world-building is excellent, creating a very creepy and alien feel at times. Sometimes, the location description is deliberately vague to challenge the reader’s perspective of where the characters actually are.

Overall, The Gone World is an enjoyable novel that will appeal to fans of hard science fiction. The book does not take a whimsical approach to time travel like Doctor Who; it is deadly serious, more like The Dark. It is one of the most serious time-travel science fiction novels I have read.

The novel very much explores what it was like to be a slave, a possession that can be used as the owner likes. It could be worked until it collapsed, beaten when it disobeyed, raped, bred, and its children sold. It was not human, just a farm animal. The slaves don’t behave like farm animals as they create their own community. They look after each other for the most part. They accept Dana and try to help her adjust to her circumstances.

There are four classes of slaves. The lowest are those who work in the fields. Then there are the house slaves: the cooks, the cleaners, etc. Above them, for the most part, are slaves who the slave owner sired, and then there is Dana. But no matter their rank, they all risk being beaten, whipped, raped, or sold off, even if they are married to a slave who is not sold off.

Two pivotal plot factors affect the direction of this time-travel story. The first is that Dana can return from the world of the early 1800s to 1976 when certain events occur. The second is that she must ensure that the somewhat reckless Rufus survives for herself to be eventually born. The relationship between Dana and Rufus is complex, but in the end, it boils down to him being a white slave owner and her being a slave.

Dana’s reactions to her situation are believable. She quickly decides to keep her origins secret, as the people of 1815 would not believe her and think her mad. This changes as she gains the trust of others. She does not freak out. She decides to keep a low profile and not draw attention to herself. An unrealistic book would have her go on a crusade to free the slaves. Mentally, she is a strong woman.

The book creates genuine empathy for Dana and the slaves on the estate. Of course, I desperately wanted characters like Alice, Carrie, Luke, and Dana to survive, gain their freedom, live as equals, and prosper. I hoped the Civil War was around the corner and would put an end to slavery, but that war was decades away. If these slaves were going to gain freedom, they were going to have to do it themselves.

Those readers who treat the novel as a thriller may be disappointed with the ending as we never learn why Dana is being transported back to the past. But that is not the point of the novel; it is an exploration of slavery and the inhumanity of whites towards blacks. It is a challenging read, especially for a white guy like me.

I want to say that it is a book everyone should read, but that is such a cliché. But everyone should read this book. America has much to be ashamed of in its past. So does Australia, where Indigenous Australians were exploited as unpaid labour and pacific islander slaves were used in its sugar cane fields. This book exposes our past and continuing inhumanity to each other and our pathetic disregard for human rights. How greed will have us rationalising the exploitation of others. I would like to say that it shows those under adversity banding together to help each other, and it does, but they are forced to band together to survive; it is not something they have chosen to do.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted. It is not a book for those who think justice will occur in the end. In a world full of greed and divided into tribes who can’t understand each other, justice is still elusive. America, like Australia, is still a hotbed of racism. Kindred is a book that will make you angry. If it doesn’t, you are probably a racist.

The story is set hundreds of years into the future where a police officer, Tara Fraser, is chasing a terrorist, Yuna, across space. Tara comes across the previously unknown Dyson wheel, and his ship is captured and dragged in. He assumes the same thing happened to Yuna with her ship, so he goes looking for her, thinking that when he captures her he will worry about escaping the Dyson wheel. He is a really committed cop.

He discovers the wheel is inhabited and stops to ask the natives if they had seen Yuna, using his computer implant to translate. Instead of helping, they capture him. He now has another problem, dealing with a treacherous native population.

The story is written in a light-hearted tone, along the lines of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. A tone I found refreshing after reading a lot of hard science-fiction and literature. This tone is reflected in the banter between Fraser and Yuna. Fraser is a stick in the mud, doing everything by the book even though he knows his employers are not the nicest people. While Yuna loves to break laws and rules and is prone to impulsive actions. Some of which are successful, others which are not.

I have read a couple of other of Graham Storr’s novels in the Timesplash series, which I plan to return to with his third novel in that series. They are time-travel thriller novels, while Never Ending Day is more of an adventure novel with plenty of humour.

I did find the dialogue slightly disconcerting to begin with, as Yuna and Fraser conversed like they were living in the late 20^th Century. But who knows how people will talk in the future. I recently listened to a radio program on trends which said that everything old is coming back in again, so maybe in hundreds of years times it will be trendy to talk like people in the 20^th Century. The dialogue was very funny at times.

 After reading a lot of hard science-fiction, I enjoyed reading something fun. I very much cared for the protagonists and really hoped they could come to some mutual arrangement to escape the wheel and its somewhat suspect inhabitants.

The Future of Another Timeline occurs on an alternative Earth. In this universe, some artifacts can be used for time travel. In a few locations throughout Earth, there are six mounds of rock that, when hit in the right combination, allow time travel throughout Earth’s history. Time geologists use them not only to view history but also to edit it. This differs from most time travel stories, in which the characters usually worry about changing history and causing unexpected results. The time geologists can’t make massive instantaneous changes (like killing Hitler) to history. The changes must occur slowly, like planting a seed of thought in a person’s mind. In the version of the timeline in the novel, the suppression of women is gradually increasing. This causes a group of time geologists to fight back by editing the timeline.

I learned a bit about a few historical figures, like Anthony Comstock, an actual special agent in the 1890s who was allowed to intercept and read every suspected radical liberated woman’s mail and arrest them for anything he deemed obscene. The book also has a parallel story about one of the main characters trying to prevent a death in the 1990s.

The novel did peter out a bit at the end, but overall it was a good read.