The End-All, Be-All of Apocalypses

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch showcases a different take on the end of the world. In a beautiful mess of time travel, apocalypse, and detective work, This novel really makes you think about how the world will come to an end. Oh, the questions I wish could be answered!

Sweterlitsch paints a picture of madness at the end of the world: The Terminus, where people are staring at the White Hole with silver pouring from their dislocated jaws, some people running and running until they disintegrate or drown, some people being stripped not only of their clothes, but of their skin and their vital organs, and being crucified upside down in midair. All of this leads me to make the connections to religion - swinging to right back where we started with Atwood's The Year of the Flood. TGW has a few religious references, the first and foremost being that QTNs invade the body and lead to a person's crucifixion; the more subtle reference being Nestor's connection to faith, with his crude painting of Jesus hanging in his living room. Most of the books we have analyzed so far have had some sort of connection to religion. The Year of the Flood contained a group devoted to religion, Future Home of the Living God contained references to religion in the street names, and led us to believe doctors thought the main character was carrying the next God, and Station Eleven's main antagonist being a man who calls himself God's messenger. I think the biggest connection between these two themes is this: religion is the beginning of the world, and where a world begins, it must end.

Upon doing some further research, I realized that I have not even scratched the surface of religious apocalypse. These books really just describe the apocalypse with connections to Christian Faith. While I won't go into excruciating detail, some faiths have some pretty different ideas, laced with natural disasters, actual spontaneous combustion, or just "not with a bang, but a whimper" type of apocalypses (read about some here).

Sweterlitsch, while also analyzing the religious aspect of the apocalypse, did an amazing job intertwining time travel and futuristic qualities. Every time Shannon Moss, senior detective, would hop to the future to try to solve the mystery of Libra and the death of the Mursult family, the Terminus would climb ever closer. This is because they were that much closer to discovering Esperance, the planet that housed the QTNs and species that would bring the end of the world to Earth. Notably, at the end of the novel, Shannon makes the assumption that she has been the echo of her "true" self the entire time. The beginning of the novel focuses on her coming back from the Vardogger tree and the "thin space" shouting that the wrong body was rescued, and that she was just the echo of the real Shannon Moss. My question is, would an echo be able to recognize their self as separate from a "real" terra firma self? I would think, since echoes are really the same people from another time, that they have a history and a life just like any other "real" person, and the one thing that distinguishes them is that they are from a different time period, or a different prong of the whisk. To wrap that up in a coherent sentence: If I hopped 30 years into the future, wouldn't that make me an "echo" of the Taylor that already lived in that future for 30 years? And the only reason that Taylor would be an echo is if I brought her back to MY terra firma? I'm operating on the thought that terra firma isn't really terra firma - that it is flexible and wibbly wobbly like the rest of time and space, and subjective to the person who traverses Deep Waters.

I think what we can gain from this novel is to stop trying to solve the question of time travel. After all, this novel is only one possible IFT of millions of ways that we humans can screw things up. Let's just leave well enough alone, and maybe the Terminus will stay exactly where it is: undiscovered, and harmless. ;)