2018 SF/horror. Shannon Moss is an investigator in a clandestine
division of the NCIS. In 1997, she looks into the torture and murder
of a SEAL's family, perhaps by the man himself… Spoilers.
Because there's a lot going on here. The US Navy has a division,
Naval Space Command (a genuine thing in our world, 1985-2002,
basically dealing with satellite management), which has spacecraft
that are also time machines; a craft can travel into the future (or at
least a future), and information and objects (and people) can be
brought back.
And my suspension of disbelief is showing signs of strain. Sure,
they've been doing this for a while and they have built amazing
spacecraft now in 1997 by bringing back future tech (and giving it
to defense contractors who have managed not to leak any of it). But
how did they do it when this whole thing started? How does the Navy
get spacecraft in the 1970s-1980s, which can support a crew for three
months in isolation during the time trip? (Yes, you can probably start
with a Los Angeles class submarine, but their reactors depend on
gravity.) On a covert budget?
Because yeah this is all secret. Quite a few people know that Naval
Space Command has actual spacecraft; many fewer know that time travel
is possible. But as far as the public is concerned, none of this
is happening.
Even though spacecraft are being launched from Earth to orbit (and
they don't have magic low-signature drives, "nuclear thrusters" are
mentioned specifically) and re-entering to land. That is not a thing
you can keep secret. A launching spacecraft looks a whole lot like
a launching ICBM as far as satellite surveillance is concerned, and a
re-entry halo is visible to anyone looking in the right direction. I
have to assume that Sweterlitsch simply didn't know this or realise
that he needed to learn about it.
But anyway. The way this secret NCIS division can operate is to travel
into the future, use their credentials to look up records of the crime
back in the day, and bring that information back to catch the
perpetrators now. Or at least to a future; they know that these
"ifs" are just one possible consequence of the present day, and that
once they leave they'll never be able to return to it. (Which they
interpret as "this entire universe will be destroyed when I leave, so
nobody here is 'real' the way I am", and nobody seems to think that
that might be a problematic attitude to have when talking to
witnesses. Cops gonna cop, I guess.)
And of course they make the classic time traveller error of thinking
of the time they came from as uniquely "real". (They call it "terra
firma", while trips to the future are to "Deep Waters".)
But there's a more interesting thing going on: there's an event in the
future, when some alien weirdness comes to Earth and destroys
humanity. They call it "the Terminus". And each time someone travels
into the future and asks those future people about what they've
learned from their own future travel, or jumps further ahead
themselves, the date of the Terminus is a bit closer…
None of that seems immediately relevant to Shannon's investigation of
the gruesome murders of the Mursult family. Even if they were living
in the house where Shannon's best friend from school lived, until
she was murdered. But through multiple future trips all the
connections will become clear…
It's good stuff. It's a time travel thriller that largely makes sense
by its own rules, and working out what those rules are is part of the
mystery. I didn't love it (particularly when it dives into the
gruesome horror voice) but I did enjoy it. Until the ending.
Things have fallen apart, and the only way out is a thoroughgoing
change. So Shannon ensures that the ship that discovered the alien
weirdness and brought it back to Earth is destroyed in a complex way
that resets the world to the 1980s, before any of that happened… but
now nobody remembers a thing of that old world and so there's no
reason the discovery shouldn't randomly happen all over again! (Best
Friend wasn't killed this time round, though apparently that change
was by accident.) Well, I don't love it, but OK.
But then Shannon turns out, in this version of history, to have got
pregnant by Best Friend's brother (in the original timeline they had
been an item but Best Friend's death pushed them apart), and is
planning to marry him and wait at home while he goes off with the Navy
to see the world… and this transition, from Shannon the tough and
competent investigator to Shannon the future military wife and mother,
is presented as an unambiguously happy ending. I mean, it might be,
for her. There's certainly less trauma in it. But because she has no
introspection about it, all we have is the author's voice saying that
this is the end of the book and the best of all possible worlds, and
oh look my action heroine is now going to be a Good Wife instead.
So there are some great ideas here, but some big holes in the story,
as well as little niggles (as I've mentioned above, and every division
between rooms aboard a spaceship being a "portal" rather than a
"hatchway"). Can I recommend it? Not to Past Me, and I won't be
seeking out more by Sweterlitsch; but I liked the attempts to make
sense of an intrinsically non-sensical world, and particularly the way
that casual failures of opsec in Shannon's experiential future (like
using Dead Best Friend's name as a cover identity) come back to bite
her before she's even made them. Not good, but often interesting.