Жон Твелв Хокс: Жазушының құпия өмірі мен шығармалары

persons of a similar name
John Twelve Hawks is the pseudonym of an author of four novels and one short non fiction book. His legal name and identity are unknown. His first published novel was the dystopian The Traveler and its sequels, The Dark River and The Golden City, collectively comprising the Fourth Realm Trilogy. The trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and has sold more than 1.5 million books. The trilogy was followed five years later by a fourth book, Spark, and a non fiction eBook, Against Authority.

Spark was published in October 2014 in the United States and Great Britain. The book is narrated by Jacob Underwood, a man who suffers from Cotard delusion, a real life neurological condition in which the afflicted person thinks that he or she is dead. Underwood is hired by a New York investment bank to work as an assassin, eliminating threats to the bank's clients. "Underwood’s strength as a hired killer is the emotionless, robotic nature that allows him to operate with logical, ruthless precision." But, when the bank asks him to track down Emily Buchanan, a low level employee who has absconded with financial secrets, Underwood gradually becomes more human and feels moments of empathy. Hawks describes a dystopia where people are beginning to be replaced by robots. Underwood's journey is an exploration into what human values will survive in a world of machines. Reviews of Spark were generally positive. The Publishers Weekly review mentioned JTH's writing style: "Twelve Hawks’s prose, cold and clinical at times, yet punctuated with moments of great sensitivity, matches the tone and mood of his setting perfectly." In a starred review in Booklist, reviewer David Pitt wrote: "It’s been several years since the Fourth Realm trilogy ended, and some readers might have wondered if the author had only one story to tell. But guess what? As good as the Fourth Realm books were, this one may be even more appealing: less fantastic, more grounded in a contemporary real world, with a narrator who is deeply scarred and endlessly fascinating." In October, 2013 Deadline Hollywood reported that the film rights to Spark were sold to DreamWorks.

On August 20, 2014, John Twelve Hawks released a free non fiction book called Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of the Surveillance States. The book is dedicated to novelist Thomas Pynchon. An excerpt from Against Authority was published on Salon. Against Authority begins with a personal description of the neurological experiments performed on Hawks when he was a child and states that all of us have the ability to reject the “right” of those in power to control our lives. Hawks describes how the reaction of governments to the September 11 attacks led to the Patriot Act in the United States and the proliferation of Closed circuit television cameras in London. He references his 2006 essay "How We Live Now" that was his first published reaction to these systematic attacks on privacy. The book explains how the Total Information Awareness program developed by John Poindexter at the U. S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) led to the expansion of the National Security Agency and the revelations of Edward Snowden. Hawks criticizes the assumption of “mass surveillance” strategies against terrorism and shows how “trickle down surveillance” has spread to small towns and developing countries. Hawks believes that surveillance technology has given those in power a crucial tool for social control. He describes how the culture of surveillance is used to track citizens for commercial reasons and gives examples of how people are now routinely watched at work. In the conclusion, he advocates a strategy of “parallel lives” that allows people to exist in the digital world while protecting their private actions and thoughts.