Triggers

Sawyer, Robert J. Triggers. New York: Viking, 2012. Originally serialized in Analog in four parts, 2012. Also available on Kindle and as an Audible Studios audiobook read by Jeff Woodman (2012).

A thriller for which the first paragraph of the brief ("stub") Wikipedia entry could serve as a logline: "In the near future, a war veteran named Kadeem Adams, is about to undergo a highly experimental memory editing treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder at Washington, D.C.'s Luther Terry Hospital. Seth Jerrison, the President of the United States, is rushed to the same hospital after being shot in an assassination attempt. Adams' treatment goes awry due to the electromagnetic pulse [EMP] from a new type of bomb planted by terrorists, which destroys the White House just as the treatment begins. It becomes clear that terrorists have infiltrated the Secret Service." The SF part, and what makes the novel relevant here, is that the EMP, possibly by establishing quantum entanglement, sets up a chain where person B can read the memories of person A and in turn be read by person C and so on for those in a sphere around the memory-editing device. In the background of the story and adding to the tension is an upcoming attack of great lethality to be carried out by the United States against terrorists and those "harboring" terrorists. The conclusion of the novel ("SPOILER" alert) has the chain branch out through increasingly subtle kinds of contact to become an exponentially increasing set of people connected in a kind of ESP empathy, stopping the attack and bringing peace: cf. and contrast Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 10March18