Despite it’s science fiction theme and plot device, Thomas Mullen’s new book, The Revisionists, is not really a science fiction book. But it starts with a single science fiction idea and then plays with it. The science fiction includes a future (dis|u)topia and time travel and plays with the lengths that the future will take to preserve itself (or so we are led to believe). The idea is slowly turned on its head and the reader is left wondering which side is right. Let’s go see what our revisionists are doing.
The story starts in the past while we learn about a future that is perfect and referred to as the Perfect Present. It was created from the ruins of the Conflagration (which happens soon after the time frame of the past in the book). In this past we have future agents who have used time travel to protect historical events from hags (historical agitators). The past events must be protected to keep the Perfect Present and stop enemies from destroying it. The people who do the protection are revisionists (or the International Association of Time Travelers). The revisionists get their orders to go and find and dispose of the hags before they can destroy the historical events.
The book focuses on several people who interact with one of the revisionists (who goes by the name of Troy Jones). Troy has to stop some hags from killing some people and from saving some other people. During the mission, his GPS device in his head gets damaged and he’s not able to track the hags as easily as he normally can. He also finds a stunning young woman in the past who he asks out on a date (in full breach of protocol). The young woman is Tasha, a young lawyer whose brother was killed in Iraq under mysterious circumstances. Tasha finds an old friend TJ, who was (and still is) an underground agitator. With TJ’s encouragement, Tasha slips some information about a unscrupulous vendor to a newspaper writer. The story makes a minor splash and disappears without any repercussions for anyone except Tasha. Tasha is blackmailed by Leo, who used to work for the government, but is now a freelance spy, to feed TJ false information. Meanwhile, Leo finds himself drawn into a Indonesian maid who is the maid/slave of a Korean diplomat.
This group of people circle around each other and when Troy finds another revisionist whose information is different than his, the cracks in the Perfect Present start being brought out more and more. The future utopia could be the precursor to Big Brother. And Troy starts wondering if he is protecting events that lead to the Perfect Present or changing events to benefit the leaders in the future.Tasha starts wondering about her ethics, morals and beliefs as interactions with Leo and TJ make her realize she needs to pick a side. And Leo isn’t sure who to trust and which group of people that comes to talk to him are really government or just another private group that he might be affecting.
Overall the book is a political thriller with a science fiction twist, but that isn’t really a good classification. It’s more about the people and the governmental actors who can take advantage of situations and do. The people are the ones who are felling the effects and the Perfect Present might be more of a prison than a great destination. Mullen does a great job juggling the characters and drawing comparisons between the future events and present events. The characters do a great job of believably breaking down due to the insane world they are part of and Mullen makes me wish the story continued, so that I could follow these characters more. There are a number of literary writers who are dipping their toes in the genre world. If we can get more great novels like this one, then I wholeheartedly approve of this trend. Highly Recommended