During my junior year of college, I had three invasive surgeries and a handful of laser surgeries on my right eye, specifically, the retina. For a long time, I was legally blind in my right eye, but as the retina stretched, my sight improved enough to not be legally blind but not well enough for me to be able to read out of it. In my right eye, I have lost a lot of vision, and what remains is distorted with areas of blindness. Since that time, I began to wonder if I would go blind some day. How would I adjust? Would I adjust? Due to the surgeries, I had to adapt to reduced vision, not a total loss of it, and this upended my world. I came close to leaving college. I spent two weeks face down for hours everyday. I had to change my driving habits; I couldn’t read as much as I needed to rest my ‘good’ eye more often. Those are easy changes compared to what a complete loss of vision would mean, and I had people to help me through that change. What would happen if the entire world completely lost their vision? In Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen, humanity has gone through just such an event. Mark Owens, the main character, relays to us how society broke down as over the course of a few months, all of humanity lost their sight. In Owens’s world, adaptive technology is available to restore vision. Yet someone is using that technology to commit murder. Owens is on the case even if he can’t see who the murderer is.
Disclaimer: The publisher provided a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Any and all opinions that follow are mine alone.
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TL;DR
Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen follows a detective trying to solve a murder where the murderer is able to hide themself from sight. How do the police catch someone who can’t be seen? Highly recommended.
From the Publisher
A riveting crime novel with a speculative edge about the ways our perceptions of reality can be manipulated.
Seven years ago, everyone in the world went blind in a matter of months. Technology helped people adjust to the new normal, creating a device that approximates vision, downloading visual data directly to people’s brains. But what happens when someone finds a way to hack it and change what people see?
Homicide detective Mark Owens has been on the force since before The Blinding. When a scientist is murdered, and the only witness insists the killer was blacked out of her vision, Owens doesn’t believe her—until a similar murder happens in front of him. With suspects ranging from tech billionaires to anti-modernity cultists—and with the bodies piling up—Owens must conduct an investigation in which he can’t even trust his own eyes.
Thomas Mullen, the acclaimed author of Darktown and The Last Town on Earth, delivers an unputdownable crime novel about one man’s search for truth in a world of surveillance and disinformation that’s all too recognizable.
Review: Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen
Mark Owens survived as a cop during a worldwide epidemic in which the entire human population went blind. This event was known as the Blinding, and it changed society. Even children born after the Blinding lost their sight. But a technology company had a solution. They had devices that allowed people to see again. But these devices came months or years after people lost their sight. Panic, riots, all the darkest parts of humanity emerged during the Blinding as people feared the worst. The police had the impossible task of enforcing the law without sight. Tragedies happened. Once the tech company was able to start producing ‘vidders’, the devices that allow humans to see, the military and police were prioritized. Naturally this created distrust between the people and law enforcement. After all, who watches the watchers, right?
Mark Owens lived through this and has the mental scars to prove it. Soon after the Blinding, his wife, a successful and famous artist, committed suicide. It left Mark devastated. The loss of his wife Jeanie follows him everywhere, and it overshadows his relationships. For Mark, his life has become the job. He’s a cop, through and through, dyed blue. When his main suspect in a murder case begins to talk about black spots covering the real murderer, Mark is skeptical. After all, many criminals blame their vidders for not working. But soon, Mark experiences the same redactions from his vision. At the same time, the new president has called for a Truth Commission to investigate law enforcement’s activities during the Blinding, and Internal Affairs has its eye on Mark. Bodies begin to pile up around Mark, and to his fellow cops, it looks like he’s a murderer. But Mark knows that someone out there has the technology to remove themselves from people’s sight. Can he find the real killer before his friends and colleagues take him out?
Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen is a third person novel based mostly in Mark’s perspective. Other characters get their own chapters, but Mark carries the story. Mark is a great character; he’s haunted by the past, loyal to the badge, and broken by the death of his wife. The chapters tend to be short and fast-paced. Mullen throws a lot at the reader but never overwhelms. This book read like a thriller with science fiction elements, and it would make a great movie.
Science Fiction, Thriller, or Both?
Genre labels only have meaning for marketing purposes. Mysteries/Thrillers and Science Fiction have a long history of genre entanglement. They are often my favorite science fiction stories because the mystery element focuses on exploring the science fiction aspect. Here, the opposite is true. The science fiction is the set dressing that allows Mullen to explore how policing would work in a world where no one can trust their vision. Mullen takes Owens to uncomfortable places, and with it, he asks some interesting questions about our justice system. How does one operate a firearm without being able to see targets? Why do eye witnesses carry such weight in court when we know eye witness testimony is extensively flawed?
Mullen also explores how heavily dependent people, in general, and law enforcement, in particular, are upon technology that is hackable. As society progresses towards more and more computational devices, this is sort of inevitable. Humans are already bad at being able to judge ‘good’ information from ‘bad’. When an information stream becomes one of our senses, what are the consequences? Mullen explores one in this novel. There is hacking, drugs, mods, and firmware/software updates. The focus is a bit narrow; I don’t think Mullen went far enough into the dystopian aspect of relying on a single company to help us see. This isn’t a criticism; it’s another way of differentiating between thriller and science fiction. Mullen’s interest is in how it affects the job, and it turns out that being unable to trust your own vision is devastating.
The Inner Sight Commune
With the introduction of vidders, reactionary movements against the technology rose up. One such is the Inner Sight Commune. This commune is a form of a Luddite society. They eschew the vidders for a more natural approach to life. Yes, this means they are all completely without vision. They work and live in a community of the blind with some proselytizing on street corners. Mark Owens’s sister joined the Inner Sight Commune, and he visits her in the novel. They have a contentious relationship at best. Owens thinks she’s a nut job for giving up her sight. But maybe the Inner Sight people have a point. One giant technology corporation is responsible for vidder tech, and the world is at its mercy essentially. (Though, let’s acknowledge that foreign nations – adversaries and allies – would ramp up their industrial espionage so as to be able to control their own source. China, North Korea, and other totalitarian states would want to be able to control the ability to censor the information their public sees.)
This is a fantastic bit of world building, and it’s spot on. Humans are wonderfully complex; there’s always a certain percentage that are contrary, often for contrariness sake. This commune is a bit of an absurd extension of the anti-vaxxer argument. However, Mullen grounds the Inner Sight’s reasoning in actual reason and not mental illness. It’s a beautiful take on humanity, and I think Mullen treats the commune with respect and fairness. He could have easily portrayed the group as a Qanon type community, but instead he postulated serious objections people would have to such a technology. It’s well done and adds depth and complexity to an already interesting world.
Google Glass and Censorship
When I was reading this, I couldn’t help but think of Google Glass and augmented reality. In theory, these would be great additions to the human technical arsenal. In practice, I’m skeptical, and after reading Blind Spots, I’m even more skeptical. Humans already give corporations enough access to our eyes and attention. But they only control so much of our vision. With some sort of glasses or ‘vidder’ type device, humans would give corporations access to all of our vision. Think of the spam and ads on the internet now, and imagine them being a constant in your eyes. You take your daughter out to the swing in the park, and ads for diapers, daycare, TV shows, new cars, etc. constantly flood your vision. For a yearly subscription, you could opt out of most ads. Then someone could hack your vision and lock you out of your device unless you pay them in bitcoin. Your competitor could hack your vision and see what product you’re developing. Florida wouldn’t have to go after librarians; it would just turn off your visual access to LGBTQ+ books. Texas would ban the New York Times inside its borders. The Chinese government could blind dissidents.
Google used to have the phrase “Don’t Be Evil” as part of its code of conduct, but the company removed it. It’s an ominous change to their code of conduct, but it’s one that matters publicly. Google is now prepared to accept evil deeds, and it’s possible to look at their acquiescence to the censorship requests of governments as proof they were correct to change their motto. They’re already too big of a company that control too much of the world’s data and communications; imagine them controlling vision as well. Mullen has posited a truly scary world in which this could happen. As the old saying goes, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Google has shown its willingness to alter its code of conduct when profit is on the line. In a world where a giant corporation controls sight, it would control everything. Politicians don’t conform; turn off their device. Competitor is making their own device; edit out their ability to see their work. It’s easy to extrapolate from Google’s real world actions to a giant companies actions when they have power over our very sight itself.
Curing Blindness?
Blind Spots is a book about a disability, blindness. Any time a book puts forward a cure for a disability, it treads volatile ground. Too often ‘cures’ for disabilities are thinly veiled ‘fixes’ that imply disabled people are broken. Mullen doesn’t do that here. In his world, there are people who refuse the cure, and there are people who reject the cure. Because in reality, it’s not a cure. Mullen’s vidders are simply adaptive devices for blind people to manage their world. The underlying lack of vision isn’t ‘fixed’ or ‘cured’. This is an important distinction.
Having people who reject the adaptive technology is a smart touch. While the Inner Sight Commune has a bit of a religious/cult-ish vibe to it, it provides a very real service and community for people who wish to be simply as they are. Owens’s opinions about them aren’t the best, but that’s okay. He’s one character, and other characters represent the choice to live with their blindness well. The Inner Sight Commune depicts a flourishing community of blind individuals. Mullen makes it easy to see that Owens’ opinion is flawed and biased.
I’d be interested in reading critiques from the blind community about this book. Because in the real world, blindness doesn’t imply total lack of vision, but in Mullen’s world, the Blinding removes sight from everyone. I think Mullen portrays blindness well and gives a well rounded view of characters living with a lack of sight.
Conclusion
Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots is an excellent mystery/science fiction thriller. It raises some excellent points about technology and vision while giving readers a sympathetic character in Mark Owens. I was glued to the pages waiting to see who exactly was behind the blind spots. If you pick up Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen, you won’t want to put this book down. Highly recommended.
Blind Spots by Thomas Mullen is available from Minotaur Books now.
© PrimmLife.com 2023