The Man Who Saw Seconds

"This is such a clever book. Our protagonist, Preble Jefferson, can see five seconds into the future. More specifically, he can see five seconds into an array of alternate futures, and if there’s an outcome he wants he can start with that and work backwards – for example, if he wants to open a safe, he can work backwards to the present where he uses the right code. In a gunfight, he can find the future where he doesn’t die – in the next five seconds, that is. So he’s both a formidable force in some ways, and importantly limited. He gets into a fight with two police officers, which brings him to the attention of the authorities. As the implications of his gift sink in – the ways it could allow him to compromise any world leader, evade any authority – a manhunt gets underway. So begins a convincing parable about the relationship between fear and evil, as the conflict shapes Preble more and more into exactly the terror that they were trying to prevent, and the stakes rise and rise. A fortune-telling gift might sound like it belongs on fantasy shelves rather than sci fi . Boldizar gives us a neuroscience-infused version. He builds heavily on recent ideas about the brain as a primarily predictive machine, and intelligence as fundamentally the ability to predict the future. We learn which layers of Preble’s brain are overdeveloped, and speculate with doctors on possible causes of the mutation, and whether it is sufficient to classify him as a different species. On all counts. An anarchist lawyer will take you through the niceties of the political philosophy at stake; the story will walk you through the nitty-gritty of military and civilian power structures, and the incentives of decision-making; there’s a section in the Canadian wilderness that is lovingly packed with geographic and survivalist information. This is a meticulously researched book, which gives it a wonderfully convincing feel. It also won the CIBA Mark Twain Grand Prize Winner for Best Satire, and was shortlisted for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Thriller & Suspense, and the Eric Hoffer Award – notably, none of those are sci fi awards. This is delighting readers across genres."