A MUST Read

[TerrasHelm]

Do you want to read about some of the new gadgetry, of the guv's, currently being used to spy on American citizens? Want it in fictionalized form so that it's entertaining as well as informative? Read my new book. . . oh wait, I'm not done with it yet. In that case, read: "The Traveler" by John Twelve Hawks

It may just be a publicity stunt, but John Twelve Hawks is said to be purposely living ‘off-the-grid'.

[loner]

C`mon now, ya gotta post a link for this kinda thing...

[TerrasHelm]

C`mon now, ya gotta post a link for this kinda thing...

I most humbly concede, Loner.


Go to the below site, click the blue link labeled The Traveler, then view the half dozen brief video clips and listen to the final 3.5 minute audio. I believe that you'll find the subject matter most intriguing. . . and daunting.

http://www.bookwrapcentral.com/autho...welvehawks.htm

* * *

Interview with John Twelve Hawks
By Rob Bedford (2005-12-04)


"It is safer to live off the grid, unconnected to the vast technology, because unseen people are watching our every move, employing technology we have barely imagined". We've talked to John Twelve Hawks about his latest book The Traveler.

Q: Your novel shows many influences, from Orwell’s 1984 to Stephenson’s Snow Crash to The Matrix films. What fiction inspired your writing?John Twelve Hawks: During one period of my life, I lived with friends in a large run-down house next to a large university. I was sleeping on the floor in what had once been the maid’s room. My expenses were about $100 a month. Every morning I would go to the university library, "steal" a novel from the shelves, and read the entire book. The next day, I would replace the novel and take another one. I basically worked my way through the entire British and American canon of literature, although I encountered the books as an autodidactic and not as a student in a lecture hall.

I’ve read 1984 twice, but a much larger influence was Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. I’ve read this four-volume set countless times, and it profoundly shaped the way I look at the world. Miyamoto Musahi’s Book of Five Rings is an inspiring book – short in length, but filled with wisdom. I’ve never read Snow Crash.

I have never owned a television. In my Amazon Short essay, "How We Live Now," I suggest that television is the prime instrument in creating a "culture of fear" in our society. When The Traveler was published, it was amusing to hear how I’d had been influenced by TV shows and movies – such as "Alias" or "Highlander" – that I’ve never seen.

I watched the first "Matrix," but my friends told me to avoid the next two in the series. The Fourth Realm Trilogy and the "Matrix" are completely different fictional creations. The "Matrix" suggests that our world is unreal and that we are fragments of consciousness in an environment manipulated by a computer. Everything in the Fourth Realm is based on reality. The alternative realms are not presented as cyber fantasies, but as real worlds. No one will ever fly in my novels.

As far as cinematic influences go, I’ve seen almost all of Kurosawa’s films. "Yojimbo," "Rashomon," and "Seven Samurai" are wonderful movies.


Q: Your novel is incredibly detailed and seemingly very well researched. How much and what kind of background reading did you do in preparation for writing The Traveler.

John Twelve Hawks: Generally the "real life" aspects of the book – such as Maya’s vision of London – are based on personal experiences. The description of the Vast Machine came from a great deal of research. I was obsessed with surveillance and our loss of privacy many years before I began to write the novel.


Q: How long was the novel gestating before you submitted it for publication?

John Twelve Hawks: I started writing The Traveler during a very dark period of my life. In my personal life, I felt like a complete failure. And in the larger world, it seemed more and more obvious that the American people were being manipulated by a variety of negative forces.

If anyone reading this is going through a similar period of despair, I extend my hand to you. This one moment does not define who you are. Try to be with people who will encourage you and not destroy your dreams.

After The Traveler was published, it surprised me when various critics said that I sat down to consciously write a best seller. If such a thing was possible, more people would do it. I wrote the book alone in a small, cluttered room, staring at a computer screen and trying to make sense of my past and our current world.

About six months after the third draft, I got an agent. A year later, I was published. During this time, I was continually rewriting the book with my editor, Jason Kaufman. The entire experience felt like a very odd dream.


Q: How much of The Traveler is informed by your own experiences?

John Twelve Hawks: Some of it is autobiographical, and this will continue in the subsequent books. But my life story won’t "explain" the book. Fictions should have their own power.


Q: What was the most challenging aspect of writing this novel?

John Twelve Hawks: I realize that The Fourth Realm is being marketed as a trilogy, but I’ve always seen it as one long novel divided into three books. Keeping all the plots and characters in order has been very challenging. Sometimes, I feel like a chef in an immense kitchen with a dozen pots and pans on the stove at the same time.


Q: Was this your first attempt at writing fiction? Writing in general?

John Twelve Hawks: I have several cardboard boxes that contain a variety of unfinished or unpublished work. Most of it is terrible. The Fourth Realm is far more ambitious than anything I’ve tried to write in the past.


Q: What goals did you set for yourself with writing/publishing The Traveler? Did you reach those goals?

John Twelve Hawks: There are many things I hoped for – that I might find a way to express my vision of the world, that I might create characters who would come alive and speak and act out a compelling story. But my main goal was just to finish the book.

Q: The Traveler can be seen as many things – a response to the erosion of personal freedoms, a response to the double-talk we receive from the government, a science fiction/fantasy thriller that simply entertains. How would you categorize your own work?

John Twelve Hawks: One of the things that bothers me about contemporary publishing is the way that books are categorized – and, sometimes, "ghettoized" – by the marketplace. I was fortunate to have a publisher that tried to avoid this. Placing books in categories keeps many writers from achieving a much-deserved larger audience.

I was never consciously combining different genres when I wrote The Traveler. I could only write a story that reflected my own personal preoccupations – it wasn’t inspired by other books or films. The spiritual vision of the book, martial arts, political concerns and a feeling of dread all correspond to my actual experiences in life. I would guess that, if the book seems to have many different elements, it’s only a reflection that my somewhat unusual life has led me to see the world differently than other people. I’d guess that a brilliant writer like Philip K. Dick didn’t walk around with "Sci-Fi" tattooed on his arm; he was only writing about the world as he saw it.

That being said, I can acknowledge that The Fourth Realm combines science fiction, fantasy and thriller genres within a dystopian framework. I hope that science fiction fans will think – "hey, this isn’t exactly what I’m used to, but I enjoyed reading it."


Q: How is work coming along on the second book in this sequence?

John Twelve Hawks: During a phone conversation with film producer Kathy Kennedy, she asked me to sum up Book Two and I said – "It’s dark."

Kathy laughed and said that all second movies – and books – presented a darker vision. In The Traveler, I established the world and the characters. Now, I’m going to give them a great many problems.


Q: Your identity and background are almost as intriguing as the story between the pages of The Traveler. In today’s day and age of a wired world, how difficult is it to stay "off the grid?"

John Twelve Hawks: It’s an awkward life, but not a difficult one. I’m lucky to have a variety of friends who help me.


Q: Do you envision a time when you will come off the grid and go public, or at least more public than you have since the publication of The Traveler?

John Twelve Hawks: I have no plans to "go public," though I am considering setting up a website. I have always seen the Internet as an extension of the novel’s fictional world – including the on-line game and the secret websites, which I helped create. But I wouldn’t want to establish a personal site that could be seen as emphasizing ego and/or marketing; I’d like to find a way to give something to the people who read my books.


Q: Many people on message boards and blogs have speculated about your identity. Some say you were published under a different name, others that you are a woman, still others that your identity is a secret is because you are in prison. What is your response to this?

John Twelve Hawks: When a person speculates about my identity, it reveals something about their own background and preferences. If the canvas is blank; the only thing people can see on its surface is themselves.

http://www.sffworld.com/mul/146p0.html

* * *


A Conversation with John Twelve Hawks, author of The Traveler

The Traveler evokes a variety of films and books–everything from George Orwell to the Matrix. Where did you take your inspiration from?
George Orwell is a favorite writer of mine and I liked the first Matrix, but the creation of the novel goes much deeper than that. When I sat down to write The Traveler I didn't think about being published. I simply wanted to understand the world around me. Sometimes the best way to find the truth is to create a fiction.

Can you describe the differences between the three main character types in the book: Travelers, Harlequins, Tabula?
Travelers are a small group of people who have the ability to send their spirit to other worlds. The Harlequins are an ancient order of warriors who defend The Travelers. The Tabula is an organization that believes that mankind is a tabula rasa — a blank slate that can be scrawled with their ideas. They are determined to destroy The Travelers. These three groups are fictional but their struggle takes place within a very realistic environment.

Is John Twelve Hawks your real name?
I wasn't given the name John Twelve Hawks at birth. It's an adopted name — just like the names the Harlequins chose at a certain time of their lives. This name has great personal significance for me, but it's not relevant to understanding the book.

One of your characters, Gabriel, lives "off the Grid," avoiding detection by what you call the "Vast Machine." Can you explain what you mean by this and why you yourself have chosen to live this way as well?
For me, living off the Grid means existing in a way that can't be tracked by the government or large corporations. The Vast Machine is the very powerful — and very real — computerized information system that monitors all aspects of our lives.

I live off the Grid by choice, but my decision includes one factor that is relevant to the publication of The Traveler. I want people to focus on the book itself and not on its author. The typical "personal slant" of most media arts coverage trivializes the power of ideas — and there are a great many provocative ideas in this novel. Everyone who reads The Traveler is going to be entertained by an exciting story. A smaller group is going to be inspired to see our computerized world in a new way.

How do you correspond with your publisher and how do you plan to correspond with readers?
I have never met my editor or any of the staff at Doubleday. I talk to them using a satellite phone or we communicate through the internet. I haven't really thought about how I'm going to answer reader questions but it will probably be through a non-traceable website.

Your message in the book about the end of privacy in our society is frightening. How much of what you portray is true and how much is pure invention?
It's all true — based on years of research. Email messages are scanned by a program called Carnivore and programs linked to surveillance cameras use algorithms to identify you instantly. Some of the facts in The Traveler — such as the description of the new "computational immunology" program developed by the Royal Mail in Britain — have never been described in any book.

What, if any, suggestions do you have for people who are concerned about identity theft, the Patriot Act, phone and internet surveillance and other invasions of everyday privacy? Some of your characters agitate against the Vast Machine. Would you advise this?
This first step is to be aware of what is going on. Most of us have given up our privacy without even knowing it. At some point, we need to express our opinions to our elected officials. The growing power of the Vast Machine is actually not an issue that is tied to a particular political party. A traditional conservative like former Georgia Congressman Robert Barr is on the same side of the privacy issue as the ACLU. The most important thing is that we not succumb to the baseless fear that is used to justify our loss of personal liberty. People objected when the government proposed something called the Total Information Awareness system: a computerized program that would track virtually all of our electronic transactions. When the name of the program was changed to the Terrorist Information Awareness system — just one new word — all the criticism vanished.

The settings in the book are captured in vivid detail–the Charles Bridge in Prague, the California desert, the back alleys of East London. Was travel a big part of your research?
My agent once asked me how long it took me to write The Traveler and I answered: "All my life." I didn't do any particular research for the locations in the novel. I simply drew on the memories of different places where I've visited, lived or worked. Virtually all the locations in the book are real. For example, there is a system of abandoned missile silos in Arizona and Jeremy Bentham's dead body is on public display at University College London.

The scenes of violence in the book also seem very real — not Hollywood fantasies.
I studied martial arts for several years and have fought both in tournaments and on the street. Maya and the other Harlequins have been trained since childhood to fight, but they're not super human; they can be hurt or killed. Readers have told me that they've found the scenes of violence in The Traveler to be incredibly exciting because they're not sure what's going to happen. This duplicates my own experience creating the book. Every time I began to write a scene that involved fighting I had no idea if my characters were going to survive.

Family seems to be both a blessing and a curse in the novel. As Maya says: "Damned by the flesh. Saved by the blood." Care to elaborate?
It was only after I finished the first draft of The Traveler that I realized how many of the characters are haunted by their fathers. Maya loved her father, Thorn, but he also destroyed her childhood. Gabriel and Michael Corrigan thought that their father was killed by the Tabula, but now there are signs that his ghost is alive. A crucial secondary character named Lawrence Takawa changes his entire life in honor of a father he has never met.

At one point in the novel, your protagonist Maya explains that there is a secret history of the world, a history of "warriors defending pilgrims or other spiritual seekers." Do you believe this? What do you think is the role of faith in modern society?

There has been a continual battle throughout history between institutions that try to control our lives and those visionaries who emphasize the value of the human spirit. Right now, there's a determined attempt to reduce all human behavior to biochemistry. If Joan of Arc was alive today she'd be put on Prozac. Faith can give us a larger perspective on our own lives as well as the world that surrounds us.

You seem to combine Eastern religion, mysticism and new age spirituality in your discussion of Gabriel's education. The novel also suggests that Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, even an obscure Rabbi from Poland may have all been Travelers–which begs the question: What (if any) is your religious affiliation?

When I was in my twenties, I was an atheist and proud of it. Now I believe in God and pray every day but I'm not a member of any organized religion. Travelers are guided by teachers called Pathfinders and I've dedicated the trilogy to my own personal Pathfinders. I've had several and they've included a Catholic priest, a Presbyterian minister, a scholar who was an orthodox Jew, and a Buddhist monk. I'm not going to minimize the differences between religions but they all have one thing in common: they teach the power of compassion and encourage that quality in our own hearts.

This is the first book in a trilogy. Any hints for readers about what they can expect from Books Two and Three?
In Book Two, a tough Irish Harlequin named Mother Blessing will enter the story; she's already forcing her way into my dreams. Expect some surprises involving Maya, Gabriel, and the Tabula mercenary, Nathan Boone. I'm not manipulating these characters to fit a plot. They seem to have their own ideas about what they want to do.

http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_int...or_number=1159

[loner]

And there`s also this torrent for the audiobook version (853.98 MB).

[Topper]

Oh, I thought perhaps someone was suggesting the book "Secret" by Dr. Michael Beckwith.

I highly recommend it