![\"\"](\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/certainty.jpg\")
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After I first discovered John Twelve Hawks<\/a> in 2014, he became my favorite living science fiction author. He had not published a new novel (Spark<\/em>) since 2014, so I was eager to read Certainty<\/em>, which will be released by Doubleday on April 28.<\/p>\n In fact I was so eager that I requested an advance review copy from the publisher. <\/p>\n Certainty<\/em> is not a pleasure to read. Its characters are not very interesting. The plot is confusingly complicated. The dialogue is ho-hum. The theme, I think, has something to do with the risks posed by artificial intelligence, though it never comes into focus. <\/p>\n Many of John Twelve Hawks’ fans will no doubt love this novel and will not see it as a failure. But I do see the novel as a failure, and I think that why<\/em> the novel fails is very much connected with the failures of editors in the science fiction publishing industry for the past twenty years or so.<\/p>\n What are editors for? Once upon a time, I think the function of editors was to get good books into print and to work with writers to make books better. These days I think most editors see their jobs as serving some kind of social purpose — “to let other voices be heard” or something, or to make up for the past social sins of the publishing industry. <\/p>\n If a person has what it takes to get a job as an editor in a New York publishing house, then one certainly ought to have the confidence to assert some editorial judgment with writers. If I were such an editor, and if John Twelve Hawks had come to me with this novel, I’d ask him a polite but pointed question: “Is there anything else you’re working on?”<\/p>\n Certainty<\/em> was doomed to fail the moment John Twelve Hawks finished his outline (if he works with an outline). The flaws are structural.<\/p>\n Certainty<\/em> begins with three different sets of characters in three different settings. This is a terrible thing to do to a reader. Before the reader has any narrative investment in the story, before the author has generated any suspense or let the reader know what the stakes are, the reader must work through not one but three<\/em> different sets of exposition. <\/p>\n Exposition is a framework in which readers can begin to follow the story. Who are these characters? What kind of place do they live in? How do the characters relate to each other? What is happening to them right now? What is at stake? Why should the reader care enough to keep going?<\/p>\n All stories of course require exposition, and one of the marks of a good writer is to make that exposition as transparent and interesting as possible. I’d wager that few writers are good enough to succeed at keeping a reader’s attention through three sets of exposition at the beginning of a story. <\/p>\n Not until somewhere near the middle of Certainty<\/em> do we get an idea of how the three sets of characters are going to intersect. I found myself constantly looking back at previous chapters to remember characters’ names, or to remember where they were and what they were doing the last time we saw them. Reading fiction, to be sure, requires a reader’s attention and concentration. But a writer is on very thin ice indeed if he overloads a reader with exposition before the reader is interested in the story or cares about the characters.<\/p>\n Many stories, of course, involve simultaneous action. A good writer can build suspense by alternating between two or even three theaters of action. But I would argue that that can be done only after<\/em> the reader has become well acquainted with the characters and deeply invested in the story. J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin were masters of that technique, but only after they had secured the reader\u2019s investment in their characters and the stakes of the story.<\/p>\n In short, Certainty<\/em> is a story that gets off to a bad start and never recovers. Insofar as the story is about AI, the message is so vague and so weak that it doesn’t stir up anything worth continuing to think about.<\/p>\n John Twelve Hawks is still my favorite living science fiction writer, because of The Traveler<\/em>, The Dark River<\/em>, The Golden City<\/em>, and Spark<\/em>. But it’s a shame about Certainty<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After I first discovered John Twelve Hawks in 2014, he became my favorite living science fiction author. He had not published a new novel (Spark) since 2014, so I was eager to read Certainty, which will be released by Doubleday on April 28. In fact I was so eager that I requested an advance review … Continue reading “John Twelve Hawks has let us down”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33241"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33260,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33241\/revisions\/33260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}