(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Too Awful to Finish: An ongoing essay series

The Accused: The Traveler, by "John Twelve Hawks" (pseudonym)

How far I got: 24 pages. Yeah, I know.

Crimes:
1) Taking one of the few opportunities each year that occur for a science-fiction book to get a general-interest marketing budget, and wasting it on this hacky, sloppy, glorified fan-fiction dreck.

2) Clumsily ripping off major concepts from four sci-fi movies and six sci-fi novels within the first three chapters, in an astonishingly offhanded way that makes the author seem like he never thought anyone would figure it out.

3) Being particularly heinous with the Slow Death by Exposition, an already consistent problem within a lot of genre work but especially bad here. "Harlequins prefer old-looking cities." "Harlequins only live in places with three separate exits." "Harlequins only wear dark, expensive fabrics with custom tailoring." Yes yes yes, and Chuck Norris has a f---ing posse, I get it.

4) Affecting that cloying, obvious, Benetton-rainbow style of multiculturism so common in this Web 2.0 era; where there's a Japanese Harlequin and an Arab Harlequin and a British Harlequin and a whole globe of other superfriends, traipsing their way across the world to have the same exact bland conversations and bland action scenes no matter where they are. And by the way, "Twelve Hawks," just because you've looked up the names of a couple of metro stations does not mean that you've painted a convincing mental image of that city. Give us a sense that you actually know something about all these global locations your book is known for, besides the stuff you can look up at Wikipedia.

5) Not understanding that making a plucky, quirky, rebellious pale young girl the main hero was already tired and cliche 20 damn years ago. Also, for making her too much like Lara Croft. Also, not the marginally cool Lara Croft from the videogame but the infinitely annoying Angelina-Jolie Lara Croft of the movies.

6) Deliberately withholding the author's real name, in a desperate bid to drum up a little viral-marketing-style publicity over who it might be. Come on, Doubleday, we all know who the real author is; some pasty, acne-riddled 23-year-old nobody, who wears floor-length leather coats and sunglasses at night to the Saturday-night filk session of Dragonomicon 17. "Worst. Attempt. At. Building. False. Suspense. Ever!"

7) Convincing me to completely give up on a 500-page book before even hitting chapter 4. Seriously, that's impressive.

8) Making this the first book in a trilogy. A trilogy?! Cheese and Rice, Doubleday, are you freaking kidding me?!

Verdict: Innocent by reason of insanity.

Sentence: Indefinite incarceration in the St. Asimov Home for Wayward Science Fiction Fanboys Who Think They Too Can Write A Novel Because They've Seen The Matrix One Zillion Freakin' Times. ( )

Clichéd and predictable beyond belief. The Twilight series seems mature and intricate compared to this contrived dud.This shows what marketing and a mysterious penname can do. Rumors are Dan Brown wrote this. Think of Da Vinci code without all that history and comic book characters. Well it isn't even that good. This is niche marketing at its worst. They created a false Internet buzz that turned out to be the publishers about the mystery of this book.You can hear the focus groups planning the story. "Hey let's make the bad brother a corporate wannabe and the good one should be cool and surf or ride a motorcycle or skydive on a motorcycle!"If you are over 14 avoid this. ( )

OK techno/thriller with no sympathetic or memorable characters. My high-point was the the introduction of a Travelor who stopped to help a stranded motorist and subsequently helped a number of families create an "off the grid" community. ( )

Half the time I read this, I thought it was cheesy. The other half of the time I really liked it. ( )

Pretty interesting combination of spirituality and science fiction. ( )

Good adventure reading - I was able to believe most facets of the story as it unfolded, but the different realms were a bit of a stretch. ( )

A dystopian tale of a near future in which a small organization, the Brethren, seeks to control everyone by technology. Of course, a few people fight back against this control. It starts slow, but picks up speed once the world is set up. ( )

It starts quite slow while Twelve Hawks sets up the world and characters. However, once the ideas are in place, it quickly picks up speed and becomes difficult to put down. I particularly enjoyed that he utilizes a heroine instead of a hero.

For my review of the trilogy as a whole, check out my blog: http://wp.me/pp7vL-3f (no spoilers, promise!) ( )

Super good, super thoughtful. There are, of course, many travelers, whose visions, because they challenge the powers of corporatization and globalization, are rejected, ridiculed, vilified, deemed "unpatriotic" (as shopping is patriotic, remember?), or, more ominously, repressed through persecution. An interesting read. ( )

So I recently read two books that kind of scared me. They were very good, but it made me want to move into the mountains somewhere and never come back. They are Traveler and Dark River. Dark River is the sequel and what the author doesn't get into about the big brother type things that are happening RIGHT NOW in Traveler he goes into in this book in so much more detail. After the first book I was a little freaked and wanted to move to a hippie commune and change my name to Snowflake but after the second book I think that might not be enough.

So what scared me? How about the fact that this technology that he talks about in the book to track people like they're hunting animals already exists. And if this technology is known, what do they have that is still in the testing stages? Did any of you see that short piece (that no tv news media reported on by the way) about these little strange flying devices in DC that look like dragonflies but are possibly cameras? Seriously???!!!! Where could they go with that if no one knows they're cameras? And if surveillance cameras don't scare you, you have no idea what they can do. Go check this out: http://www.notbored.org/nannycams.htm...

and more generally: http://www.notbored.org/scp-faq.html

The cameras are the just the smallest entity of what is going on though. So until the day that I become Snowflake WaterSuite, I will be much more careful about how I present my information to the world.

Back to the books though. I was very impressed with the not only the storyline but also John Twelve Hawks writing style. I've read so many fantasy/sci-fi stories that when I come across someone who writes different it's like drinking fresh water for the first time. Unless you've read a thousand fantasy or science fiction novels, you may not be aware that about 9 out of 10 of them are the same story with different character names. It makes trying to find something to read a little frustrating if you go into the book store thinking, "I wonder what's new in THAT section..."

I'm definitely looking forward to being freaked out by the third book! ( )

mix of thriller, techology angst, the matrix, and spirituality. still undecided whether i like or not ( )

Interesting as a symptom of a fairly common contemporary paranoia, perhaps, but otherwise just a crude, self-pitying, and self-satisfied fantasy of adolescent rebellion. What's "John Twelve Hawks" rebelling against? Oh, the usual suspects: an age-old corporate conspiracy to do evil, of course, as well as TV commercials, news, bad traffic and smog. The poor baby. ( )

When The Traveler ends it is obvious that the story is not over – kind of like Darth Vadar escaping after the first Star Wars movie. But it does reach a logical stopping point. The Dark River leaves us hanging with a very unresolved plot. It’s as bad as a “To Be Continued” TV show. Even when someone shot JR we just had to wait through the summer re-run season to find out what happened. But I suspect we’ll have to wait two years to pick up this story again. The Traveler could stand on its own as a book. The Dark River cannot. I don’t think it would make any sense to start the story with the second book. And I almost wish I had waited for the third book to come out before starting any of them.

My complete review is combined with The Dark River, and is on my Blog, Nate's Library, specifically at: http://nates-library.blogspot.com/200... ( )

I wasn't sure about this one at first, since it seemed initially like it was going to be a lone warrior, heavily violent sort of story, but it soon smoothed into something that felt like cyberpunk without really being cyberpunk, if that makes sense. Violent at times, but still very human.

One interesting part of the story is the glimpse it gives of the loss of personal privacy that all of us accept. I doubt this will convince anyone who's convinced that giving up this data is harmless, but for those who are already concerned by the implications, this book draws the obvious conclusions of what things would be like if an organization had access to all this data and the necessary tools to mine it. Of course, it does the usual "well, normal people are unaffected by this" cop-out to focus on those being tracked by a powerful organization, but hey, it's meant to be entertainment, not education as to the flaws in data mining.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and its characters, and I'll probably pick up the next in the series to see where they go from here. ( )

I'm not much of a sci-fi/action/thriller reader. I picked this one up at a thrift store because the cover made it look like a self-published book - no cover copy, no reviews, no author bio. But, as they say, don't judge a book by its cover...I was quite surprised to find out that this has been the subject of so much advance hype.

All that aside, I found this book to be very entertaining. Definitely great summer reading. The premise seems influenced by a combination of the paranoia and new age spirituality in The Matrix, while the sword-wielding, karate chopping female heroine is straight out of Tombraider and Kill Bill and the training of the titular Traveler borrows heavily from Star War's Yoda and Luke, but altogether it equals more than the sum of its rather derivative parts. Combined they make for a thoroughly diverting tale.

The characters weren't quite as fleshed out as I might have preferred (Twelve Hawks commits the cardinal sin of frequently telling more than showing) and there was a bit too much exposition, but nonetheless the prose is economical and it can be unusually suspenseful in parts. Plus It's very up-to-date, very topical. The Patriot Act even merits a brief mention. I suggest that if you share my deep-seated distrust of the current scope of the government's power and the omnipresence of technological invasions of privacy, you should read this book. ( )

This is an amazing book! I read it coming home on the plane from a job interview in Kelowna so I had time to read it from start to finish in one sitting. It is rare to find a book that is so creative and captivating. I love fantasy novels but I think that it would appeal to anyone. As a librarian, I found that it raises important issues of privacy that more people should be aware of. You are being watched- you just don't know it.

Take one part The Matrix, another part 1984, and a few dashes of anti-government militias and cults, and you have the world of The Traveler. As with any good dystopia, the fear the reader feels when reading this book comes from the fact that everything is just so plausible. We already have RFID tags, GPS, face recognition software, and computers that are powerful enough to handle the data. The question is, do we have any organization strong enough to do something about it? In Twelve Hawk's world, there is one, the Tabula (and for readers not sharp enough to realize right away that it's from the idea of the tabula rosa, there's some nice dialogue explaining it), or the Brethren (yeah, we get it-Big Brother, two brothers on other sides, all that stuff). There’s nice dialogue explaining it all. When the characters aren’t on the run from this shadow organization intent on monitoring everyone, they explain their histories, theologies, the history of their theology…you get lots of back story. This is nice because the character development doesn’t feel quite as stunted as it does in many pop novels, but it does feel forced.

This book has the same made-for-film feel to it as Dan Brown's books-a flashback here, a car chase there, explosions, sword fights, mixed martial arts, a little romance- though the writing isn’t quite as hackneyed. It is, however, just as paranoid and blends just enough fact with conjecture (or fiction) to keep the reader thinking the entire time it might all be true. It also does not shy away from the spiritual in the way that many pop-lit books do. Indeed, the spiritual realm drives the plot of the book, the motivations of everyone involved, and even the reader.

I read this on a recommendation (and when you suggest books to so many people, there is a requirement to read all recommendations) and I learned more about the person who recommended it than I did about the importance of living “off the grid” (we get it, the author is clever because he lives off the grid-he’s not a sheep like the rest of us). I will read the rest of the trilogy and I’ll probably find a number of people to recommend it to. It’s not great literature, but it is a fun read. ( )

I read this book because of a review or its inclusion on a list of best somewhere and was completely surprised. I didn't know anything about the book or the author.

This is a great debut science fiction work, though some have speculated that Twelve Hawks is a psuedonym for an established author. Whatever the case, this novel does a wonderful job of establishing a new timeline of history, a new cultural reality, and a new set of races/ethnic identities. Very often, such attempts end up weak and thready. But this one doesn't try to do too much and succeeds nicely in establishing a framework to tell a dystopian story.

The story is a kinda of a Jason Bourne meets The Matrix meets Orwell mix. The dystopian features, however, seem very plausible and realisitic (adding to the charm of the companion website also).

All in all this was a great read and a fun one, too. I was hard pressed to wait for the sequel which is now out and I ahve reviewed also.

5 bones !!!!! ( )

This one may be a victim of its own advertising. I bought The Traveler expecting a literary tale of a near-future dystopian society. A cyber-1984 as The New York Times stated in their review. Something that would show how our paranoia over terrorism and the like could be brutally exploited, ushering in Big Brother. The truth is The Traveler has a lot more in common with Tom Clancy than George Orwell. Within the first thirty pages I realized that I wasn't getting what I paid for, but it wasn't so badly written that I quit either.

What The Traveler really is, is the first novel by a promising author of pot-boiler action. The book had the feel of a novelization of a movie that hasn't been filmed yet. Everything about it was slick, flat and high-octane. Something like the literary equivalent of a very good James Cameron action movie. Every chapter involved some combination of running, shouting, shooting or swordplay.

I won't sum up the storyline, since so many others have. Suffice to say that if The Unabomber and David Icke got together to write The Matrix, you would have something like The Traveler.

The characters are pretty two-dimensional and the conspiracy just strained credibility a little too much for me. The author also has the habit of belaboring his point. At one point when our hero The Harlequin is running through a city avoiding the surveillance cameras she is spotted by an ATM camera. After two hundred and fifty pages bemoaning the fact that cameras are everywhere and privacy is lost, a character has to take the time (and extra bit of dialog) to point out that you don't even notice ATM cameras any more. Thanks John Twelve Hawks, but I got that concept a hundred pages back.

I disliked the implication that if you weren't a traveler or a harlequin, you were a simply a 'citizen' or 'drone' that could be used and even sent to your death with no qualms. Who are the heroes here?

I'm not sure why this world is described as a dystopian novel. It is ostensibly set in the 'real world' and most people seem to lead happy, simple lives. There is a shadowy organization that is drawing together plans to rule the world, but they are only in the early stages, really. The Traveler is about as dystopian as Star Wars: Episode One.

Lastly, I don't like the hype surrounding the anonymity of 'John Twelve Hawks'. Reminds me a little too much of when Lion's Gate was trying to convince us that The Blair Witch Project was a documentary.

So overall, I was disappointed with the book. However, it was a very well written once you get past the hype. I will pick up the sequels, but I'm not exactly awaiting them with baited breath. ( )

What an interesting story and author. I am not sure which I was intrigued with more. I can't wait for the second installment that is being released this year. I envy the "Off the Grid" life of Twelve Hawks, but I could never do it. ( )

This book is a cyber/sci-fi twist on the governmental totalitarianism perfected in 1984. Oddly I think that the book actually downplays the true amount of control and tracking that can be done with modern day technology but Hawks still manages to make the world feel like a clear coffin with evil figures always watching your every move. The supernatural aspects of the book were not greatly elaborated but seeing how this is the first of a trilogy I guess that can be overlooked.
The Characters tend to be a little one dimensional but do avoid being cookie cutter jokes. All in all the book offers a unique look at where the world might be going buts gives the hope that people banding together always have a shot at overcoming the odds. 87/100 ( )

I feel like I should've enjoyed this book much more than I did. The concepts in the plot are the kinds of things I normally love in a suspenseful thriller with a touch of sci-fi and/or fantasy. There was plenty of action in the book, plenty of intrigue to keep my brain guessing. It's taken me a while to pinpoint where it fell flat for me, but I think it's that the characters were boring. They all have the potential to be interesting, but they weren't. I knew what they planned to do long before any of them seemed to. We never got to see too deep into anyone's thoughts or emotions. At times I felt like I was reading a summary of a story rather than the story itself. Still, the author gets points for creativity for the plot. The closer I got to the end of the book, the more franticly I began to wonder how he could possibly wrap it all up, and wouldn't you know it, I discover this is just the first book in a series. Argh! The plot is interesting enough that I will likely pick up the next book, and I do have hope that the characters will develop a little more yet. When I described this book to my husband however, he added it to his read pile without hesitation. He said it sounds interesting, and "I don't need character development." ( )

Every time you make a phone call, text a friend, buy something on line or email personal information, you create an electronic file which may be saved somewhere. Recently, the governor of New York was forced to resign because his text messages about illegal activity were accessed, even though he deleted them. AT&T had a record of his messages! John Twelve Hawks, in his future fiction novel The Traveler, tells a story of the future where a single company, the Tabula, attempts to control all information about every citizen and thus control the population. In a world without privacy, a handful of visionaries (the Travelers) try to live "off the grid" and seek the truth hidden by the Tabula's lies, propaganda and mind control. ( )

Review at my blog - SPOILERS. ( )

http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/20... ( )