In the post-sight world of Thomas Mullen’s sci-fi cop thriller, “Blind Spots,” bad things happen in the blink of an eye. We don’t know what’s caused this global shock of the near future — maybe the president’s Truth Commission will find out — but we do know it has an emphatic name: The Blinding.
No one can see without the aid of a “vidder,” a small implant that “relays radar, GPS and every variety of visual data to (the) occipital lobe’s visual cortex, compensating for (one’s) permanently blinded eyes.”
Invented by Kai Ballantine, an Elon Musk-like boy-genius, the vidder has made his corporation, EyeTech, the most powerful company on Earth. With Ballantine’s device, folks can now perform a range of quotidian tasks, including driving a car.
Members of law enforcement like Det. Mark Owens are among the first to have vidders. An ex-marine, Owens finds himself in a gunfight with a black-market firearms dealer named Slade, who smashes Owens’ vidder. Relying on hearing alone, the detective fires off a round that kills Slade, though he very nearly wings his own partner.
It’s a bit of recklessness that leads to an expanding (and suspect) Internal Affairs (IA) investigation, and, for most of “Blind Spots,” Owens’ judgment and sanity are universally questioned, until, of course, his final redemption, which may, or may not, be forthcoming.
Sure, Owens suffers from PTSD like billions of others in the aftermath of The Blinding. But he’s also trying to manage his long-term grief following the death of his wife, a successful painter, who Owens discovers hanging from a rope. There appears to have been little motivation for her suicide. More doubt creeps into the IA probe: Owens is crazy — maybe he killed her.
With its big city corruption, cynical police captain and backstabbing co-workers, “Blind Spots” has all the elements of a conventional police procedural operating as a Future Noir, a term coined by author Paul M. Sammon to describe Ridley Scott’s influential film, “Bladerunner” (1982).
Judiciously pacing the violence, Mullen applies the intricate plotting skills he refined in the Atlanta Cycle, his trio of celebrated historical mysteries that began with “Darktown” (2017), based on the first black policemen to serve on the city’s all-white police force.
If these prior books relied on the established universe of Jim Crow, “Blind Spots” requires some imaginative world building. Its unnamed city is an ultramodern ruin full of pimps, hustlers and bent cops. Homicide-by-strangulation and “dark rape” are on the rise. 3-D holographic technology is commonplace.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
To be sure, things get weird fast in “Blind Spots.” Looking into the slaying of an EyeTech-associated scientist who was working on a secret project off-the-grid, Owens interrogates the victim’s scientist colleague who claims she witnessed the assailant but can’t identify him because, as he fled, he became a “black blur” in her vidder.
Skeptical, Owens places the witness under his personal surveillance when she, too, is killed. He pursues the shooter, who also becomes a “person-shaped darkness” in his vidder.
Vidders aren’t supposed to do this — hacking safeguards are in place, protests Kai Ballantine, smugly. Owens is not reassured when he learns that Ballantine has rolled out a new vidder update know as CleerVu, a disguising enhancement that offers its users “the ability to look different than before but still have people intuitively know that it’s you.”
The hunt for the perpetrator(s) is on: Are they disgruntled EyeTech insiders? A competitor known as Obscura? Religious zealots of the tech-hating Inner Sight cult? Rogue FBI or police with draconian agendas?
“Blind Spots” becomes several mysteries that converge into a futuristic puzzle picture, varnished by the author, though not without a few preposterous, if excellent, fixes, for which SyFy always grants special permission.
The action in the novel moves into dystopian or post-apocalyptic realms; however, “Blind Spots” can’t be categorized precisely by either adjective. Certainly there’s abuse of power, but there’s no authoritarian leader or tyrannical political order (though forces are gathering to make it so).
Hence, “Blind Spots,” must fall into a science-fiction subgenre — let’s call it a “Vague Plague” novel, which reaches back to Mary Shelley’s pioneering post-apocalypse, “The Last Man” (1835), in which an uncertain “contagion from the East” wipes out humanity in the 21st century.
Elements of Machiavellian capitalism and religious extremism oppose finding a cure for The Blinding, and their representatives offer intriguing suspects for Owens. A powerful industry has sprung up around EyeTech, and it has a strong economic incentive to keep people permanently attached to their vidders.
The author of “Blind Spots” doesn’t engage in the cheap pessimism that struggles for supremacy in the modern science fiction field, but he does take the contemporary threat of populist authoritarianism seriously: This is the real specter haunting Thomas Mullen’s tale of things to come.
In “Voices Prophesying War” (1966), I.F. Clarke wrote, “Throughout all the varieties of futuristic literature, the unwritten formula has always been: Tomorrow begins Today.”
Indeed, “Blind Spots,” is actually set in the Almost Present. Few of its technological innovations seem unbelievable. CleerVu isn’t different in principle from ordinary social media operations that modify facial features and identities. (Apple’s smart glasses are slated for 2026.) As for the danger of tomorrow’s Opsin, an addictive, synesthetic hallucinogen considered the “ultimate blindness-coping drug,” just thinking about today’s Fentanyl will put you in a coma.
“Difficult to see,” said the thinker whose name is Yoda. “Always in motion is the future.”
FICTION
“Blind Spots”
by Thomas Mullen
Minotaur Books
320 pages; $27.99
