THE MAN WHO SAW SECONDS by Alexander Boldizar – Global Thriller, Sci-fi, Satire

Title: The Man Who Saw Seconds
Author(s): alexander-boldizar
Publisher: CLASH Books (2024)
ISBN: 978-1960988072

Rating:

Village BooksAmazon

“How can a man who can see the future make so many mistakes?” (page 19)

The Man Who Saw Seconds builds an entire geopolitical thriller around this question. Alexander Boldizar’s novel infuses a high-octane narrative with a surprising emotional core as it becomes an existential meditation on time, determinism, and the limits of empathy.

Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future, a gift that escalates from trivial to explosive. He keeps a low profile, gambling across the country to support his wife and three-year-old son, Kasper, and maintains a friendly chess feud with Fish (a Pynchon-esque allusion to Bobby Fischer; full name Robert Legmegbetegedettebbeknek). Fish is an anarchist-lawyer whose conspiracy theories make him a morally intriguing wild card for Preble.

When one exhausted lapse in Preble’s judgment escalates into an altercation with over twenty NYPD officers, he sets off a chain of consequences so extreme yet absurdly plausible in their political escalation that they feel true to life, projecting readers into the uncanny.

Boldizar excels at tracing political panic to its most illogical endpoints.

NSA agent Bigman—another Pynchonian wink—views Preble as a threat to presidential power. What follows is a catastrophe of ego and fear between the two: a rogue intelligence officer, an unhinged international crusade, and nuclear states dragged to the brink of annihilation, all because Bigman refuses to give Preble the peaceful, productive life he desires. It is a satire that sits on a mirror’s edge. Boldizar understands how fragile our systems are and how old conflicts do not die in our world, but mutate into new digital-age tensions.

Amid its chaos, the novel’s heart lies in Preble grappling with the limits of his ability. Seeing five seconds ahead does not always save him from grief, exhaustion, or moral failure. Often, it magnifies them.

This conceit is well-suited for action sequences—and they are cinematic feats here—but it also reorients the reader’s relationship to time itself. What does it mean to witness your own potential death? To choose, out of infinite threads, the one life you’re willing to live?

Boldizar’s granular knowledge of political machinery and military defense can occasionally overwhelm readers not so familiar with these areas of expertise, but the book’s ambition and intelligence far outweigh any struggle with this complexity.

In The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar has crafted a thriller that is equal parts timely and timeless and asks the question of whether seeing the future is any match for the fallibility of being human.

The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar won Grand Prize in the 2024 CIBA Humor & Satire Awards. 

Note: Boldizar’s next book, Ride or Die Girl, will be released by Simon & Schuster in the fall of 2026.