Zed is an intelligence agent from ‘the Perfect Present’, sent back in time to Washington DC circa 2006 to ensure that the horrific, catastrophic event known in his time as the ‘Great Conflagration’ happens, for without this event his own perfect, stable world will not be quite so perfect.
Zed is an intelligence agent from ‘the Perfect Present’, sent back in time to Washington DC circa 2006 to ensure that the horrific, catastrophic event known in his time as the ‘Great Conflagration’ happens, for without this event his own perfect, stable world will not be quite so perfect.
Zed’s presence in our present is necessitated by so-called ‘historical agitators’ who also have access to time-travel technology and are misguidedly attempting to alter history and prevent the Great Conflagration.
Ensuring that the atrocity occurs is a tough and uninspiring duty, but Zed is the right man for the job, because after his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident, he knows that life is tough and doesn’t have much to live for. So far, so typical for the genre of sci-fi. However, from this initial premise Revisionists gets a lot more nuanced.
In a recent interview with The Irish Times, sci-fi legend Iain M Banks described the genre as one of ideas and philosophy – and The Revisionists lives up to this demand. In our present, Zed meets Tasha, a young African-American lawyer who is having difficulty reconciling her semi-bourgeois lifestyle with her anger at her brother Marshall’s death in the US Army in Iraq and her friendship with college boyfriend TJ, an anti-war activist.
Tasha represents the quintessential educated American who has pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to a life of relative affluence, but who still sympathises with less mainstream points of view. Her brother Marshall was a juvenile delinquent, and while the army straightened him out, it ultimately killed him in a war to control the very resources that fund Tasha’s lifestyle.
More confusingly, while Tasha agrees with TJ’s view on many topics, she recognises that at root he is a self-serving jerk who will rage against anything he doesn’t happen to be in charge of.
Add to this mix Leo, a former CIA agent now working for a private ‘security company’ that is trying to frame TJ while simultaneously spying on the Korean Embassy, and Sari, the Koreans’ Indonesian slave-maid who the gallant yet sleazy Leo is sort-of trying to rescue, and the plot thickens.
There is plenty of action in this book to keep you turning pages, the writing is impeccable, and the background well researched and realistic. Author Tomas Mullen has received much praise for his work, and it is certainly well deserved.
