The Revisionists

Starred review from July 11, 2011
Mullen (The Last Town on Earth) explores the ethical implications of time travel in this excellent thriller set in the near future. After a megadisaster known as the Great Conflagration devastates the world as we know it, "the Government" creates the Department of Historical Integrity to prevent historical agitators (or hags), who are able to travel through time, from trying to change the past. The DHI assumes that such horrific events as the Holocaust, the 9/11 attack, and the Great Conflagration are necessary evils to bring about "the Perfect Present," an era of no world problems. One DHI agent, known simply as Zed, travels back in time to Washington, D.C., shortly before the Great Conflagration to ensure that nothing interferes with the murder of an investigative journalist, Karthik Chaudhry, about to meet an important source. Meanwhile, hags try to prevent Chaudry's death. The complex concatenation of events that follows make this book a one-sitting read despite its length.

September 1, 2011
Mullen (The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, 2010, etc.) ventures into espionage for his creaky, overly ambitious third novel. 

You might think Zed is a light-skinned black guy. In fact he's from a future world in which race, ethnicity and the attendant conflicts have been eliminated. He's time-traveled back to our post-9/11 world to blend in with the "contemps" and execute his mission. Zed's job is to stop other time travelers ("hags," or historical agitators) from revising history. He will protect the Events that lead to the terrible but inevitable Great Conflagration. This is all very portentous, but you don't have to take it seriously. Eventually Mullen tires of straddling two worlds, the hags fade away and he focuses more on the contemps and a very conventional tale of corporate machinations. The opening finds Zed in Washington, at a parking lot near the Potomac. He takes out two hags who are trying to prevent the abduction of an investigative reporter. From here on the story takes baby steps. The reporter's disappearance will not surface in the media until the halfway point, and the identity of his abductors will only be revealed at the end. Besides Zed, Mullen introduces three other protagonists. Leo, ex CIA, is a spy with a conscience, tracking WikiLeaks-type subversives for a shadowy corporate outfit. Tasha is a corporate lawyer determined to ferret out the circumstances of her brother's death in combat overseas. And Sari is a virtual slave, an Indonesian maid for a Korean diplomat and his abusive wife. The four will bump up against each other. Along the way there will be misunderstandings, tailings and more abductions.

Mullen's novel has attracted, magnet-like, all the clichés of the genre.

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Starred review from September 1, 2011

"The past was gone." When Zed's wife and daughter die in a car accident, the government gives him two months to mourn. Then agents appear at his apartment and remove all trace of them--their pictures and clothing, computer files, his daughter's teddy bear. They even take the clothing his wife had bought him. Zed lives in a world that is traumatized by memories of a terrifying past and determined to prevent that past from occurring again. Through time travel, Zed is sent back to our present time to ensure that nobody gets in the way of a soon-to-happen conflagration that ultimately leads to his own amnesiac future. This is either a novel about a horrifying future in which dissent is crushed before it starts and history is altered to fit the present, or an equally horrific present in which corporate interests and lawmakers collude and the apparatus of enforcement is progressively outsourced. Maybe it's about both. VERDICT Mullen (The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers) has crafted an outstanding dystopic novel, but, surprise!, the dystopia includes today. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/11.]--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
What will the future be like? It's a question that prompts many a philosophical discussion. In award-winning novelist Mullen's intriguing, if overlong, thriller, the future is perfectno famine, strife, or despair. As a member of the government's Department of Historical Integrity, Agent Zed is committed to keeping it that way. To that end, he must ensure that every historical eventglorious and heinous alikeplays itself out. As the novel opens, Zed travels back to the present, where he is aggrieved by hags, a collection of agitators hell-bent on preventing calamities before they happen. As a countermeasure, Zed insinuates himself into the lives of several unsuspecting souls: a disgraced former spy, a lawyer mourning the death of her soldier brother, and a domestic servant abused by her foreign-diplomat boss. The deeper Zed digs into their lives, the more he fears for his own. Mullen (The Last Town on Earth, 2006) serves up a heaping helping of paranoia in this exploration of the extent to which we can control our own fates.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)