BKTRAVLR.RVW 20080217 "The Traveler", John Twelve Hawks, 2005, 0-385-66135-5, C$32.95 %A John Twelve Hawks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Twelve_Hawks %C One Toronto Street, Unit 300, Toronto, ON, Canada M5C 2V6 %D 2005 %G 0-385-66135-5 %I Random House of Canada Limited/Doubeday %O C$32.95 416-364-4449 Fax 416-364-6863 randomhouse.ca %O http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385661355/robsladesinterne http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385661355/robsladesinte-21 %O http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385661355/robsladesin03-20 %O Audience n- Tech 1 Writing 1 (see revfaq.htm for explanation) %P 456 p. %T "The Traveler" Since John Twelve Hawks refuses to say who he is, there is a lot of speculation about that. To give you some clues to his (or her) identity, "The Traveler" (as well as "The Dark River," the second book of what is supposed to be an unfinished trilogy) is what you might get if Deepak Chopra and Philip Pullman were asked to write a "book based on the films" conflating both "Enemy of the State" and "Live Free or Die Hard." If you can get your head around that, you might enjoy this story. The Buddhists (well, *some* Buddhists) tell us that there are six realms of existence. The author says that some people (Travelers) can travel (incorporeally) between the realms. If other people, who can't travel between the realms (Pathfinders), teach them how. Those who do travel to the other realms become wise and compassionate people who also get to be great lie detectors (if they concentrate). How they get to be wise and compassionate is not revealed, so the fact that some of them turn out not to be wise and compassionate; but greedy, mean, and power-hungry; is only as surprising as the fact that they sometimes turn out to be wise and compassionate. A group of people known as the Tabula or the Brethren (depending upon the group to whom you are talking) have been hunting down and killing Travelers for millennia, although they didn't really know why until the philosopher Jeremy Bentham invented the Panopticon, his theoretical prison where the jailers could see all the prisoners, but the prisoners wouldn't see the jailers. At that point, the Tab/Breth realized that they needed to implement the Panopticon by spying on everyone, and realized that the Panopticon wouldn't work if some people were able to leave their bodies and come back with wisdom and compassion. (Why wouldn't the Panopticon work when there are compassionate people in the world? Sorry, that is left as an exercise for the reader.) Somehow the Tab/Breth have always been rich and powerful, even though the idea of spying on the masses hasn't been a major idea until recently. Another set (it's hard to say group, since these guys are the ultimate paranoiacs, and don't even trust each other) of people, called Harlequins, have been protecting Travelers, or, at least, trying to keep them from being killed. Both Harlequins and Pathfinders seem to be deeply contemptuous of Travelers, as well as being haughtily disdainful of love and compassion, so it is hard to understand why anyone bothers. The rest of us live within the Vast Machine of unthinking consumerism, credit cards, and RFID chips embedded in our foreheads and wrists ... oh, sorry, back of the hand. (It's hard to keep these newage syncretistic mythologies straight, sometimes.) Except for some isolated groups who live "off the Grid," without credit cards and RFID equipped passports. Some of these groups live pastoral "back to the land" type lives, and others scavenge in the sewers and subways under major cities. These groups can be contacted by looking for two secret graphical symbols in public places, or by posting messages on public bulletin boards on the Internet. Somehow the Tab/Breth, despite almost unlimited budget and manpower, diligent searching on the Internet (including hacking into Carnivore and using it for their own searches), and the release of viruses onto the Internet (which, unlike real computer viruses, actually scamper around from computer to computer like little mice running down the bitstreams) haven't been able to figure this out. The use of technology in the story gives us some more clues about John Twelve Hawks. He/she obviously likes the Internet, but doesn't know anything about basic computer technologies, including viruses. He (and the off-the-grids) don't know anything about encryption, anonymizing technologies, ad hoc authentication, or onion routing. The Tab/Breth are trying to use quantum computing (although they really have no idea why), and are using one of the real (though not the most promising) technologies, but obviously nobody has ever seen liquid helium. (One of the interesting characteristics of Helium II is that it actually has no turbulence at all, so the roiling pea soup described in the book would not be an issue.) The quantum computer is currently just being used to invite someone from another realm to come and visit. (At least two of the realms house some very nasty people, and the Tab/Breth are at least as paranoid as the Harlequins, so it is difficult to understand this eagerness. However, since the Tab/Breth have been killing Travelers as fast as they can find them, maybe they don't know this ...) In another few years the third book may come out and explain all of this. It'll have a major job to do ... copyright Robert M. Slade, 2008 BKTRAVLR.RVW 20080217