John Twelve Hawks - The Fourth Realm Trilogy
Ok - here is what Wikipedia says about JTH: John Twelve Hawks is the author of the 2005 dystopian novel The Traveler and its sequels, The Dark River and The Golden City, collectively comprising the Fourth Realm Trilogy. The trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and has sold more than 1.5 million books. "John Twelve Hawks" is a pseudonym and his real identity is unknown.
Ok - here is what Wikipedia says about JTH: John Twelve Hawks is the author of the 2005 dystopian novel The Traveler and its sequels, The Dark River and The Golden City, collectively comprising the Fourth Realm Trilogy. The trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and has sold more than 1.5 million books. "John Twelve Hawks" is a pseudonym and his real identity is unknown.
Well I bought and read all three books in 2012 and found them a fantastic read, even if the end was a slight letdown.
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The books are set in the near future and lay out a world where the real power lies not with people or governments, but in the hands of a secret organisation who call themselves “the Brethren” but who their enemies refer to as “the Tabula”. The Tabula are a centuries old secret society who believe in the importance of control and stability, making them in essence advocates of a kind of extreme Utilitarianism. They are influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham who advocated psychological rather than physical punishment to reform prisoners. And here's the rub - Australian prisons were also influenced by Bentham's ideas. If you do a tour of the infamous Port Arthur penal colony in Tasmania, you will see the Model Prison where prisoners were kept in complete isolation and permanent silence. The old Pentridge gaol in Melbourne also had a solitary confinement wing (called a panopticon) based on Bentham's ideas. There is now discussion about whether to keep it for heritage purposes or not. For my sixpence worth, the whole bloody lot should be bulldozed!
Come 2014 and John Twelve Hawks has written a free non-fiction book called Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of the Surveillance States. I downloaded it as a PDF file in August 2014 and have just finished reading it on my ipad. It is a timely reminder of the rise of the Surveillance State that was already in progress but which has escalated dramatically since 9-11. Now our emails and telephone metadata are captured along with every detail of our lives and stored away for future reference. Further, more an more of our actions are captured and analysed and categorised so that, in future, our threat value can be determined. And right now, in a very disturbing parallel, we have the awful situation where our two major Australian political parties, Labor and Liberal, have banded together this week under the guise of anti-terrorism to push through the Upper House of Federal Parliament the most awful retrograde laws to extend even further the laws protecting the "Surveillance State".
How do you reduce your footprint - a timely question to ask and one which is discussed in the book.
How do you reduce your footprint - a timely question to ask and one which is discussed in the book.
- Always use anonymous web browsing via a VPN
- Surf or search the web anonymously using something like TOR
- Pay cash or use giftcards rather than using your bank card
- Don't use flybuy cards or such like
- Turn location services off for your phone or ipad.
In further exciting news, John Twelve Hawks has just finished a new book called "Spark" which I have pre-ordered and which should be delivered next month.
John Twelve Hawks - Spark
John Twelve Hawks's latest novel Spark was published on October 7, 2014 in the United States and Great Britain. I had pre-ordered and it finally arrived in the mail on 27th October 2014. I completed it in early November 2014 and enjoyed it immensely. It is one of those books that is hard to put down once started.
A quick summary: The book is narrated by Jacob Underwood, a man who suffers from Cotard delusion, a real-life neurological condition in which the afflicted person thinks that he or she is dead. Underwood is hired by a New York investment bank to work as an assassin, eliminating threats to the bank's clients. "Underwood’s strength as a hired killer is the emotionless, robotic nature that allows him to operate with logical, ruthless precision." But, when the bank asks him to track down Emily Buchanan, a minor employee who has absconded with financial secrets, Underwood gradually becomes more human and feels moments of empathy. Hawks describes a dystopia where people are beginning to be replaced by robots. Underwood's journey is an exploration into what human values will survive in a world of machines.
Initial reviews of Spark were generally positive. The Publishers Weekly review mentioned JTH's writing style: "Twelve Hawks’s prose, cold and clinical at times, yet punctuated with moments of great sensitivity, matches the tone and mood of his setting perfectly." In a starred review in Booklist, reviewer David Pitt wrote: "It’s been several years since the Fourth Realm trilogy ended, and some readers might have wondered if the author had only one story to tell. But guess what? As good as the Fourth Realm books were, this one may be even more appealing: less fantastic, more grounded in a contemporary real world, with a narrator who is deeply scarred and endlessly fascinating." [13]
Film rights to Spark have been sold to Dreamworks so we can probably expect to see the screen version some time in the near to medium future.
My only negative comment is that the book is written in the first person - to my mind, it would have been better to have written it in the third person - I generally dislike first person books and avoid them. It does mean that I kept transposing the first person narrative to third person in my own mind as I read it. Why do people write in first person!
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