Triggers

By: Robert J. Sawyer

Narrated by: Jeff Woodman

Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

On the eve of a secret military operation, an assassin's bullet strikes President Seth Jerrison. He is rushed to the hospital, where surgeons struggle to save his life. At the same hospital, researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is experimenting with a device that can erase traumatic memories.

Then a terrorist bomb detonates. In the operating room, the president suffers cardiac arrest. He has a near-death experience - but the memories that flash through Jerrison's mind are not his memories.

It quickly becomes clear that the electromagnetic pulse generated by the bomb amplified and scrambled Dr. Singh's equipment, allowing a random group of people to access one another's minds.

And now one of those people has access to the president's memories - including classified information regarding the upcoming military mission, which, if revealed, could cost countless lives. But the task of determining who has switched memories with whom is a daunting one - particularly when some of the people involved have reason to lie....

BONUS AUDIO: Includes an exclusive introduction by author Robert J. Sawyer.

©2012 Robert J. Sawyer (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

A Grind

Any additional comments?

...kept trying to get into it but the characters were so flat and the science so poorly hashed out, I had to say goodbye 3 hours into it.

You can’t have the MacGuffin resolve the issue SPOILERS

So, the book was pretty good, until the end - and that’s when it stank up the joint.

The conceit here is, “What would happen if people knew the memories of individual other people?” And the author has a black box that gets this to happen to a group of people - including the President.

Interesting stuff, and the author explores the intricacies very well.

This is akin to what happens at the beginning of The Martian. The wind/dust storm that arises is impossible. Couldn’t cause the problems/destruction that it causes. But it gets us to the central question of that book, “What would happen if an astronaut were stranded on Mars?” All the science after that initial storm is correct. You can ignore/forgive the set up because the outcome more than makes up for it.

Here, the reason for the cause of the connections isn’t the important thing . . . until it is again. And you can’t use a MacGuffin twice. You can’t not explain something, and then have that something solve every problem in the book, and while we’re at it, how about the world, too.

That’s just weak writing. That’s poor plot structure.

And that’s a $#!tty book.

Political pablum

Don't waste your time or credit unless you believe in cum-by-ya fairytales. A snow job.

And they all lived happily ever after

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

If you like fairy tails, go for it.

Would you ever listen to anything by Robert J. Sawyer again?

Probably not. The guy has talent, but the story got lost in the end.

What didn’t you like about Jeff Woodman’s performance?

Actually there wasn't anything bad about the performance, he is just guilt by association.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Triggers?

The second book! Throw it out and re-write. New story line, complete the plots. More conflict.

Any additional comments?

Get a better editor or better friends to steer you.

Woah, Trigger! A weak, simple tale (FULL SPOILERS)

This is an intellectually weak, self-indulgent book.

In his boyish Audible introduction, Sawyer tells us this is his first venture into the thriller since TV poured money into his garage for "Flash Forward".I

He treats the thriller reader with disdain, twisting and turning the workings of the United States government. We expect character compression--a single FBI agent, not three or four, but we do not expect a single Secret Service Agent to stand in for almost the entire Justice Department and Homeland Security. After the destruction of Independence Hall, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Sears Tower, the President and the Secretary of Defense decide to (and this is the MacGuffin) murder 107 million Pakistanis to defeat Islamo-Fascism*, and the Congress and military leaders are never mentioned. The head of the Secret Service and two of his minions convert to Islam for money and Heaven and conspire to assassinate the President, presumably finally swayed through Imam Voldemort's Imperio curse. 

Sawyer ignores democratic safeguards to make his point: we could achieve peace if we just understood each other.  While I do not expect a wonkish recapitulation of "The West Wing", I do expect, given his needless diversion to LA to give a cameo to an actor friend on the set of his fictional White House drama "Inside the Beltway", some recognition that we do not make decisions in a vacuum. (Many Presidential Libraries have an Oval Office; all are closer than LA.)

But for this book to tell its simplistic tale, Sawyer needs the contrast of every-man-is-an-island to the tapioca utopia of his group mind. He cannot show successful cooperative systems or else risk undercutting a variant on The Shared Moment from Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos. And if you do not know those works, you should. They are the books you should give those who hate science fiction. Simmon's books lightly twine Keats, Chaucer and Mark Twain in one of the greatest science fiction epics. Stop. Find Dan Simmons now.

But back to this thing.

Sawyer simplifies interactions and erases milennia of social contract--even in its admitedly flawed American model--to make his slushy ill-thought naive conclusion: if we knew each other as we know ourselves, everything would be fine.

Sawyer wants us to surrender ourselves to a group mind and the tyranny of the majority. He ends in the Galapagos and quotes Darwin but ignores the implications of redundancy, of evil, of madness, of faith, hoping that a compassionate Intelligent Evolution will mitigate the brutality of natural selection. 

Sawyer is a Canadian, and in a slurry of factoids chooses to tell us that the man who created Superman is Canadian but not that among the treasures lost in the White House immolation is Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize or the desk where Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. America is a flawed and riven country, dating to the Articles of Confedration, always trying to be better, but Sawyer ignores this. Americans must be monochromatic for this story to work. There is not a single difficult decision in this book, and that makes it anti-American.

Nor is the book well-written. We open with a presidential speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial rallying the American people after attacks across the country. It is a bold move, and demands crisp rhetoric, but it fails in mushy simple phrases that echo a high school commencement speech. He evokes Gettysburg but Sawyer's cadences stumble, and the metaphors are weak. 

I first heard Jeff Woodman in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close". He does well here, particularly in the role of a Sikh doctor. It is a voice that could easily slide into parody. Other voices echo Sarah Palin, a female Forest Gump and the Kennedy quaver. Here he is equal to the material.

* The Secretary of Defense convinces the President to murder millions by using the bizarre analogy that the United States used the atomic bombs to retaliate for a few thousand dead at Pearl Harbor. No. Dropping the Bomb was a complex and much debated decision and even now is a Rorschach test in American policy. But making it a complex nuanced decision erodes Sawyer's argument for the shared mind utopia.

boring

This book started with a bang and that was pretty much it. Not sure what the point of the book was. World peace since we can now read everyone's minds? Thought I should sing Kumbaya at the end. Not worth the money.

Disappointing

Would you try another book from Robert J. Sawyer and/or Jeff Woodman?

Sawyer can write amazing stuff (Calculating God, WWW Trilogy, Starplex) but he is just as able to write average stuff like this one.

What was most disappointing about Robert J. Sawyer???s story?

Reasonably interesting but disappointing really. Not as deep a story as the author @RobertJSawyer can write. I'd guess it's watered down because it's written so it can be turned into a movie.

You didn???t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

Wonderfully read by Jeff Woodman.

Middle was good: start and finish were not.

What was most disappointing about Robert J. Sawyer’s story?

I really felt that the story's start was very jumbled. Maybe that was the point, maybe it wasn't. But anyone who listens to the end will probably feel as I did: it was rushed, rushed, rushed. I could almost see in my head a pushy publisher telling the author to finish it or to finish it in 20 pages that should have taken more than 100. Spoiler Alert: to go from only the initial people, to anyone they touched, to 'coming with the sun' in only a few pages just felt rushed.