A Better World - Marcus Sakey
When we last saw Nick Cooper (“Just ‘Cooper,’ please”…) he’d tossed his job. To be more accurate, he tossed his boss – off the roof of a 12-story building. The guy deserved it, though, and so Cooper’s been rewarded with a new job: he’s a special advisor to the President. The country’s a mess, though, and the situation in the Oval Office isn’t a whole lot better.
Out in flyover-land, Cleveland to be exact, Ethan Park and his family had finally become accustomed to suburban life when “The Children of Darwin” cut that city (and two others) off from the rest of the country. First there were empty shelves in the groceries, and then the power went off. And finally, the mistake by the lake was quarantined by armed soldiers. Cooper knew from analyzing the patterns – his special gift – that this was all part of a plan, a plan that he’d been tricked into setting in motion. Not only did he set it in motion, but by doing so he made the mastermind untouchable. Cooper could sense what was coming, and knew that it ain’t gonna be pretty. Can you say “civil war”? A war between “normal” and “abnormals”? Well, that’s what he saw coming… |
Marcus Sakey’s alternate reality, first posited in Brilliance, continues to unwind in the second installment of the series, A Better World. It’s little different from the reality in which we already live, except that starting about 35 years ago, one in every thousand or so people was born an “abnormal.” You could think of these abnormals as sort of a modern equivalent of the Roman (or Greek) pantheon of the gods: you’ve got your god of patterns, goddess of hiding, goddess of organization, god of statistics… Small wonder that many normals, worldwide, are threatened by the thought that the abnormals might organize.
While Brilliance put Sakey on the map as a writer of speculative fiction (he was already on the map as a mystery/thriller writer for novels such as Good People and The Amateurs), this second chapter in the saga feels more like a placeholder. It moves the story forward, to be sure, but it lacks the pacing and immediacy of the first novel in the series. In that sense, it’s a good deal like the middle book of many trilogies, the one in which the questing party splits up and the action forks.
A Better World doesn’t do much more than reopen the presumed closure at the end of Brilliance and carry the action forward. There’s little introduced that’s new, and nothing takes place that wasn’t fairly predictable from the get-go. The characters don’t change, with the exception of a couple of stereotypical politicos, and most of what happens is fairly unremarkable.
Given the slam-bang opening salvo Sakey fired in Brilliance, A Better World is somewhat disappointing. The epilogue, however, offers hope that the next installment will make up for the letdown.
Let’s hope so…
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