Book 10 Jul 2007 10:55 pm
Stay off the Grid
Here is another new cool series by a mystery author. Not an author that writes mysteries, an author no one has met… No seriously, look at his RH page here. There is nothing.
John Twelve Hawks has written two novels. The Traveler was the first and that is now available in paperback. Dark River is the second in the Fourth Realm series.
A couple of cool interviews, here at SFF World, and here is the J12H blip from the Telegraph article,
John Twelve Hawks
Age Unknown
Real name Secret
Previous occupation Who knows?
Address Off the grid
Star character Warrior-babe Maya
Commercial status One novel The Traveller (2006): UK sales, 150,000-plus. Sequel The Dark River due out in July.John Twelve Hawks is either the world’s most mysterious author or one of its most brilliant conmen. His agent and publisher insist they have no idea of his true identity, describing how he communicates via untraceable satellite phones, using a digital synthesiser to distort his voice.
He does not own a television and drives a 15-year-old car. They report conversations in which Twelve Hawks intones, ‘I saw your office the other day,’ without revealing how or when.
He has also told his editors that he has visited every location he writes about, including London, Prague, the Arizona desert… and Hell. Hawks’s determination to live ‘off the grid’ – without credit cards, conventional ID, personal bank-accounts or a fixed address – is a radical response to the creeping menace of the surveillance society.
His debut novel, The Traveller, read like an obsessive, paranoid mix of Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Matrix and Blair/Bush legislation, in which populations are constantly monitored, supervised and coerced into appropriate behaviour by the ‘vast machine’ of computers, micro-chips and CCTV.
Traveler was a really interesting read, and while some of the reviews I have read feel that Dark River falls into the “middle child” syndrome of the trilogy and is weaker than the first, I am still excited to read it.
I know it isn’t necessary to show the full size cover of The Traveler, but it is just so PRETTY.
Anyways, this is a great set of novels, and they really bring to mind the issues that we in the United States are having with privacy, and with the whole 1984 “Big Brother is Watching You” concept.
A good read all around, go check it out! They should both be available in your local independent bookstore!
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