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John Twelve Hawks
John Twelve Hawks is the pseudonym of an author of four novels and one short non-fiction book. His legal name and identity are unknown.[1] His first published novel was the dystopian 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.[2] The trilogy was followed five years later by a fourth book, Spark, and a non-fiction eBook, Against Authority. BiographyIn the sources listed and in his interviews, he has stated that he was born in the United States. In the non-fiction Against Authority, Twelve Hawks wrote that he grew up in the 1950s. He is a Buddhist who had meditated for most of his life. In the Spiegel interview he states he is not a Native American. In the Spiegel interview he talks about visiting East Germany before the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. In the USA Today article, his response to a question about religion began with, "When I was in my twenties..." and when an editor asked him whether the "realm of hell" could be compared to current conditions in Iraq, Hawks replied "it's more like Beirut in the '70s". In the Spiegel interview and in the Daily Telegraph article, Hawks states that he drives a 15-year-old car and that he does not own a television.[3] The SFF World interview indicates that Twelve Hawks once lived in a commune and learned about literature by stealing books from a restricted university library and then returning the books the next day. In the same interview, he states he wrote The Traveler after passing through some sort of personal crisis. In the interview in SFF World Twelve Hawks claims that he has "no plans to go public" regarding his identity.[4] According to Twelve Hawks' agent, "He lives in New York, Los Angeles and London", and The Traveler sets its story in all three of these locations.[5] In a 2008 interview on Joseph Mallozzi's weblog, he answered a series of questions about this life:[6]
PseudonymIn Against Authority, Twelve Hawks describes writing The Traveler. His decision to use a pen name was triggered by a combination of personal and political reasons:
During an online conversation he had with his fans on the We Speak for Freedom website, he explained the origin of his name:[8]
Published worksFourth Realm TrilogySparkSpark was published in October 2014 in the United States and Great Britain.[9] 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."[10] But, when the bank asks him to track down Emily Buchanan, a low-level 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. 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."[11] In October, 2013 Deadline Hollywood reported that the film rights to Spark were sold to DreamWorks.[12] Against AuthorityOn August 20, 2014, John Twelve Hawks released a free non-fiction book called Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of the Surveillance States.[13] The book is dedicated to novelist Thomas Pynchon. An excerpt from Against Authority was published on Salon.[14] Against Authority begins with a personal description of the neurological experiments performed on Hawks when he was a child and states that all of us have the ability to reject the “right” of those in power to control our lives. Hawks describes how the reaction of governments to the September 11 attacks led to the Patriot Act in the United States and the proliferation of Closed-circuit television cameras in London. He references his 2006 essay "How We Live Now" [15] that was his first published reaction to these systematic attacks on privacy. The book explains how the Total Information Awareness program developed by John Poindexter at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) led to the expansion of the National Security Agency and the revelations of Edward Snowden. Hawks criticizes the assumption of “mass surveillance” strategies against terrorism and shows how “trickle down surveillance” has spread to small towns and developing countries. Hawks believes that surveillance technology has given those in power a crucial tool for social control. He describes how the culture of surveillance is used to track citizens for commercial reasons and gives examples of how people are now routinely watched at work. In the conclusion, he advocates a strategy of “parallel lives” that allows people to exist in the digital world while protecting their private actions and thoughts. Bibliography
References
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