Book #59

The Traveler
by John Twelve Hawks

Stop. Don't look. I said don't look! Oh, now you've done it: now the closed circuit camera on the building behind you, and the secret government agent sitting at that cafe with the digital camera implanted in his left earlobe, have both taken your picture. Your image will be put through facial recognition software, which will encode your features into a string of numbers which will be entered into a database that the government maintains. Today they will record your height, your weight, the colors, styles, labels, and fit of your clothing, cross-referenced by material and country of origin (With a red flag attached for clothing from questionable countries -- told you not to wear your Iranian burqa. Why can't you wear a nice Mexican burqa like the rest of us?). They will compare your haircut to that of all the celebrities on file, to see who you subconsciously wish to resemble -- and it had better not be someone like Richard Gere or Jane Fonda, or any of those hippie stars. They will also get an image of that book under your arm, "28 Ways To Shingle Your House With Tortillas," and it will put you into the following categories in the file: book reader, homeowner, do-it-yourselfer, potential homemade bomb-maker, idiot. Your file, already several megabytes of data just like this, will be e-mailed to dozens of different functionaries, who sit smugly at their desks and sip imported coffee while they page through the pictures of citizens and think, "If they only knew just how much we invade their privacy. But they don't. Mwahaha."

Then they will eat a danish. And skip to the next file.

If that description terrified you, then this book is the one for you. If you read it and thought, "Yeah, so?" then don't read The Traveler. Sadly, I fall into the "Yeah, so?" category, and so there was a fundamental disconnect all the way through this book. It's about an evil conspiracy, who call themselves the Brethren and who others call the Tabula -- because we couldn't decide on a name, could we, Mr. Twelve Hawks? -- who seek to turn the whole world into a Panopticon. This was a prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham a few hundred years ago, and the way the prison works, the prisoners can never know when they're being observed by guards, so they have to assume they're being watched all the time. Once you teach the prisoners that they always have to act as if the guards are watching, and that punishment for misbehavior is immediate and severe, then you don't actually need to watch them: they will make it a part of their natural behavior. Using the millions of cameras, and national ID tags and GPS chips in cars and phones and such, and the electronic trail we all leave, the Tabula are slowly teaching the world that we are always being watched.

And that would be frightening, except the Tabula doesn't plan to do anything but watch. Oh, they have a vague plan of making everybody the same and using mass entertainment to distract them and keep them docile while the Brethren rule, but they aren't going to do anything with their power except -- rule. And watch. Always watching. The author failed to take this evil world-dominating group to the next level: when they use their evil knowledge of everyone's habits and such to do evil things to them. The Tabula never do that, not even in the scenes when they use their evil knowledge to track people down. Sure, these guys are hard to hide from, but I'm not a Traveler or a Harlequin. Oh yeah, that's the rest of the book's plot: the greatest threat to the Tabula's control are people called Travelers, who can astrally project into alternate universes, and who use the perspective they gain to show people a better way to live. These Travelers, who conveniently include every major prophet and every influential person throughout history, are protected by cold-hearted killing machines called Harlequins. That's right, Harlequins. No, there's no reason for the name -- it just sounds really cool. Not true: there's a reason. But it's stupid, and the real reason for the name is, quite obviously, because it sounds really cool. The book's about the last two Travelers and the Tabula's attempts to find them, while one of the last Harlequins tries to protect them.

See, here's the issue. You can't actually control people by watching them. You also need to remove all influences that get people to act in ways that are counter to your uber-society's purpose. Because there will always be those people who are willing to be subversive, or just perverse, and fight against the machine. Even if they're being watched -- maybe sometimes because they're being watched, which is an even harder tendency to control in this watching world; how do you intimidate attention seekers by watching them? -- they will still do things you don't want, even if they get punished for them. Because our culture values rebellion and individuality, even now, even today. Our media-created images of what makes an individual are pretty screwed up, but we recognize them as screwed up, and we cherish those few individuals, either in public life or of our personal acquaintance, who seem to us like the real thing.

If you want to control people's hearts and minds, you need to do one of the three things laid out by the Big Three Dystopias: divide and conquer them through fear and double think as in 1984; control them with gene therapy and lots and lots of drugs as in Brave New World, or encourage them to drown in their own stupidity as in Fahrenheit 451. This book doesn't do any of those, though it has hints of all three. But the only thing it takes to a proper dystopian extreme is the invasiveness of cameras and electronic information tracking. And again, if all they're doing is watching us and writing down everything we do, a la Harriet the Spy, who cares? People have watched each other since the dawn of time: privacy has always been something of an illusion. How many books have described the small town atmosphere, where everyone knows everyone else's business? Or the crowding of big city life, where you're never really alone? So now the watchers have cameras and computers: so what? We're already being watched by our bosses, our neighbors, our families, our pets. A fear of that shows a level of paranoia that is more harmful than helpful -- and, might I add, feeds in to the real means used to control our populace, to whatever extent we are controlled: fear. This book gives a description of people living Off The Grid out of the watchers' view, and it sounds like an inordinate amount of hassle. And as the Harlequins in this book show us, when you put your effort into living Off The Grid, you don't really get to do anything useful, nor do you get to fight in the most subversive way: by having a happy life. The parts of the book that rang truest for me were the moments when the Harlequin character longed to give up the eternal struggle and just -- live. Happily, even if blissfully unaware of the people who are watching you and not doing anything to you. She should have done it: happiness is the true rebellion.

Wow, that's a whole lot more rant than it needed to be. But then, so was the book. In the end, the action scenes were okay, and the astral projection/Traveler scenes were better, but the characters were bad, the plot was shallow and silly, and the message was something I just don't buy -- the only thing it has going for it is the vague guilt I feel from imagining that I'm a tool of the system teaching people to scoff at the Vast Machine's control over us rather than helping them fight against it by following the wisdom of this book. But I won't give in to the mass-marketed subliminal influence of this book! You can't brainwash me into toeing your line, Twelve Hawks, can't use emotional control to get me to do as you think I should do, can't use your manipulative language and innuendo to make me believe you when you tell me who my enemy is! I will think for myself. And I think: meh.