Five year’s-best lists for Triggers
by Rob - February 12th, 2013.Filed under: Awards, Reviews, Triggers.
My novel Triggers — first published by Ace after serialization in Analog, and currently eligible for nomination for the Hugo, Nebula, and Aurora Awards — had a very good showing on year’s best lists, and has just been nominated for one of Canada’s top literary awards.
The award is the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award for Best Canadian Adult Book of the Year. Note that that’s best book, not best novel — the shortlist of ten books makes no distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The Evergreen Award is a big deal, with the nominees chosen by librarians and Ontario residents voting in a year-long promotional campaign for their choice of winner.
As for year’s best lists, I was thrilled that Triggers came in at #3 on Barnes and Noble’s official year’s best science-fiction list, was named #1 science-fiction book of the year (by authors of any nationality) in Quill & Quire, the Canadian publishing trade journal, and also made the general year’s best fiction/nonfiction list in The Maine Edge, and the SF&F year’s best lists in January Magazine and The Christian Century.
Triggers comes out in paperback at the end of March 2013, after this very successful run in hardcover.
Mr. Sawyer works through the permutations with one surprise after another, including the president’s deep, dark secret — now in somebody else’s possession — that would make him a one-termer for sure. The positive side is that the president can appreciate firsthand the cost of the orders he’s given. He now shares the memories of a returned Iraq veteran, called for him up by the trigger phrase “crying babies … and the smell of smashed concrete.”
Techno-future, telepathy: The third ingredient is a consideration of terrorism itself. Mr. Sawyer, a Canadian, remembers what Pierre Trudeau did back in 1970, when he took such drastic action following the murder of one of his ministers that terrorist cells have never surfaced in Canada again. What might an American president do? Get away with doing? Be justified in doing? And is there another way out? Triggers is constantly gripping on the surface and seriously provocative deep down. — Tom Shippey in The Wall Street Journal
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February 12th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
Congratulations and Good Luck! I enjoyed the novel immensely :).
Stay inspired!
Michelle