Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be
considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as
brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with
special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though:
just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people.
Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two
seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the
microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?
Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a
person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can
even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely
where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer;
the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm
terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing
innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been
on his trail.
That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes
underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story?
He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit
is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.
What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will
change his life…
| In Brilliance, Marcus Sakey steps way, way out of his comfort zone.
Heretofore known for a string of standalone crime novels based in his hometown
of Chicago, Sakey has leapt sideways into series speculative fiction. And what
a leap it was! Brilliance may well be the first time in history that this
reader was pleased to find words such as “END OF BOOK ONE” on a novel’s final
page. |
Yet the beauty of Brillance
is that, as already proven in his crime novels (The Amateurs, At the City’s Edge), Sakey’s greatest strength lies
in an ability to create characters with whom his readers readily identify;
characters with whom they’d be happy to sit down and share a beer. “Abnorm” or
no, Cooper is a dedicated father, a confused ex-husband, and a dependable
friend – which is a lot more than most of his coworkers can say.
Sakey’s alternative history – the action takes place in
2013, but in a timeline in which Michael Dukakis won the 1988 election – version
of SpecFic is a brilliant (dare I say that?) example of the so-called Butterfly
Effect. You just add a small twist to historical events, then sit back and watch
the change snowball through history. What might have begun as a curiosity – a handful
of especially gifted children identified in 1986 – snowballs into a “war on
terror” run by an all-powerful agency, and an uneasy truce between a restive
public and a small group of the “different.”
At the heart of Brilliance is an age-old truism:
power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Sakey can’t be faulted for
falling back on a tried and true plot, for as long as there are humans there
will be greed – both for money and for power. The only question in Brilliance is whether Nick Cooper and
his friends have the wherewithal to fight back.
No comments:
Post a Comment