Nov 2025 BotM - Infinite Drift

[Kaje]

This month's winner is Infinite Drift by Brent Hartinger

“It’s a tank full of warm water. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Seventeen-year-old Ollie is out with his best friends on a Saturday night, and they decide to try the “sensory deprivation” tanks at a store called Infinite Drift.

But when he gets out again, the world seems vaguely… different. And it feels like he’s being watched.

Could he have somehow crossed over into a different dimension? Or is he going insane? After all, he’s still distraught over the death of his little brother eight months earlier — an event no one knows he accidentally caused.

Ollie tries to "reset" things by going back into the tank. This time, he emerges into a world where the Yellowstone "supervolcano" erupted four years earlier, almost wiping out human civilization, and one of his best friends is dead.

But Ollie’s little brother is alive again.

Unfortunately, Ollie is being watched — by the robot-like creation of a cosmic monitoring station left in operation by a civilization that died out eons ago. And the being is ruthlessly trying to eliminate a strange "disruption" in the Ollie!

And so he has no choice but to go back into the tank yet again…

Infinite Drift is the latest book from Brent Hartinger, the author of the LGBTQ teen classic Geography Club, but it’s unlike anything he’s ever written a page-turning mind-bender with a bonkers bisexual love triangle.

Content warnings for (view spoiler)[ death in the family, violence, homophobia, dysptopian (hide spoiler)]