REVIEW: "The Traveler", John Twelve Hawks

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rmslade () shaw ca>]

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


======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
      Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm
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