It’s like you’re asking deep questions - but then there’s, you know, there will be something awesome. Initially set in 1997, the story revolves around Shannon Moss, a federal agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who is assigned to track down a missing girl. So that’s a very cool, somewhat unique mixture, because normally it’s kind of one or the other. Sweterlitsch’s latest ( Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 2014, etc.) is a mind-blowing fusion of science fiction, thriller, existential horror, and apocalyptic fiction. In any event, it tells us nothing at all about the bookwhich would be nice to have a title accomplish. So, you have this super-unique mixture of questioning all of the biggest elements of what it means to be conscious, and then distilling them into very captivating stories. It all gets a bit confusing and muddled near the end though and leaves more questions than it answers. There are several possible meanings in the bookit could refer to the end of the world, it could refer to the little facets of future time that, once abandoned, are gone forever, or it could mean something entirely different. And in the case of The Gone World, again, these massive questions are distilled down into a hyper-interesting 1997, which is a somewhat slightly twisted, slightly science-fiction version of ’97, that allows for all of these big questions to be asked.

So in Tomorrow and Tomorrow, it’s in a dystopian broken social-media collapsed future version of the United States, which is a place that… I would like to be creative in that space. Rating: The Gone-Away World is far AND away, unquestionably and without a shadow of doubt the very finest and best novel ever to be awarded just four measly stars out of five by the universally. BLOMKAMP: What I’ve come across in the stuff you’ve done, and particularly with The Gone World, is the idea that you take all of the most interesting, deepest questions about what it means to be human, questions that touch on theological ideas as well, and you distill them into something that is a compelling story in a space that I like to be inside of.

The gone world book review