The Professor

Twin Peaks minus the dream logic. Agent Shannon Moss drinks a lot of coffee, travels amid pine trees to investigate murderous goings-on at the Blackwater Lodge and finds herself hip deep in dopplegangers. No dancing dwarves, but Moss is missing a limb. “Hospital corriders were unnerving spaces” and “they’d all slipped behind an invisible curtain that hung halfway across”. It’s a wonder no one turns up wrapped in plastic.

Let me say at the outset “The Gone World” is absolutely worth reading, full of striking imagery and the first hundred pages or so create a mild giddy excitement at the genre mash-up going on. “True Detective” gets mentioned in “Gone World”’s blurb and, yeah, there are antler-tastic crime scenes, a key player referred to as “Cole” and talk of life being a dream (in “True Detective” McConaughey played ‘Cohle’, espoused similarly existential dribblings, got a cosmic perspective on things in the final episode and a missing girl was in play) but “Gone World” serves the female characters way better than “True Detective” even if you want to read that series as a critique of toxic masculinity which, bearing in mind how series 2 jumped the shark, I am disinclined to do. Instead, there are moments, ideas, passages in “Gone World” which clearly signal that Tom Sweterlitsch is not just messing about in genre here. No writer who has an AI manifest as Gary Kasparov and talk about hastening the technological singularity and transhumanism is doing so just to tick SF off the list. He can genuinely do passages which would not be out of place in modern procedural crime or idea-heavy SF novels. To do so in the same novel is impressive and quite exhilarating. I really hope he writes more SF.

Yet, there are oddities. Sometimes the prose descends to brute stage directions and occasionally a stronger editorial eye would have been good (“The moment someone mentions the Turing test *at* you, assume they know nothing”; a bomb is “sewn inside his rectum” – now that’s what I call a…oh, you know). Some of the SF ideas are well thought out, others are very hand-wavey. Nanotechnology in the air is a fun idea, but quickly falls apart when you think about it and Sweterlitsch seems to think “it was an orchestration of thousands – millions, maybe – of robotic particles”. Well, since we’re talking nanotechnology I’d conservatively put the figure more around the trillions. While we’re at it, sitting in the “Courtyard Marriott’s lobby bar” and flicking through top security FBI documents manifested in mid-air while there’s a bachelorette party at the next table seems a little casual. The base on the dark side of the moon where spacecraft augmented by tech from the future set off for Deep Time also, like many of the ideas, hinted at entire other juicy novels but was only ever used as a cut scene to get us to another time period. Then there are the many “Twin Peaks” similarities – whether intentional or not – which will leap off the page to any committed Peakie and Moss’s (ironic?) love of “The X-Files” comes across as one notch too knowing. Some too may have a problem with Shannon’s ultimate fate in the epilogue but I shall say no more for fear of spoilers. All this, alongside the positives, made “Gone World” a weirdly frustrating novel at times.

Still, my concern as the pages turned was that the narrative was going to descend into lots of shouting and incomprehensibility and it’s to Sweterlitsch’s great credit he keeps control and maintains clarity even while providing a spaceship to be blown up at the end. There is clearly a literary ambition at work here – the no-spaceships cover, the title, much of the sense of melancholy and pining for companionship – and it’s quite an interior narrative, with shifts from third to first person, despite the time-travelling spaceships. It’s also a brave writer who – post-Red Dwarf’s “Time Slides”, post-Star Trek’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise” – attempts any time-travel story these days. Capsule summary? I wouldn’t mind jumping forward in time 20 years and seeing what Mr Sweterlitsch himself is up to. Fingers crossed the White Hole of the inevitable stylish Netflix adaptation doesn’t prove to be his Terminus.