Over at Enter the Octopus, there’s some speculation about sci-fi author John Twelve Hawks. I first heard about Hawks when I was a bookseller. I was told that he was signed by the same editor who signed Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown, that his book The Traveler was supposed to be the next big thing, and that he lived totally off the grid. Off the grid was repeated many, many times, the way that everyone was so crazy about the fact that Jackie Chan did his own stunts many years ago.

Lately, a few book bloggers have been getting letters from Hawks, and some people think this is a big promotion for Hawks’ next book, The Dark River. Matt at Octopus thinks that Hawks is a pen name for a group of authors. I think that he might be a pen name for one, already-established sci-fi author who figured that the romantic backstory of someone who lives in the woods and only communicates, Unabomer-style, with letters and handwritten manuscripts, would sell some books.

Whatever. I read the first seventy-five pages of The Traveler and I couldn’t give a good goddamn about any of it.