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Certainty
The intense dystopian world-building of John Twelve Hawks (The Traveler) returns with a masterful journey through the near future of Artificial Intelligence, in which a wise, orphaned ten-year-old girl goes on the run with only her trusty "Interactive Toy" to guide her toward New York City, where a dark landscape, and perhaps a hidden hero, await her.
In a post-pandemic future where AI has infiltrated daily life, the line between what is real and what is digital has eroded to nothing. As Manhattan is overrun by wireheads who spend their days literally plugged into virtual reality, algorithms and robots have replaced everything from the criminal justice system to individual loved ones.
As long as she can remember, ten-year-old Kate has felt like someone was watching her. She has been orphaned since the pandemic, her foster parents find her eccentric and off-putting, and her legal guardian is nowhere to be seen. Now, an algorithm has predicted the very worst—within thirty days, Kate will either be killed, or become a killer. When two police officers arrive at her home in Maine intending to implant her with a tracking device, Kate is urged by her trusted AI Interactive Toy (a talking stuffed seal named Zeno) to make an immediate escape. Confused and looking for answers, the girl sets a course for New York City and begins an Orwellian journey into the unknown.
Gripping, intricately plotted, and delightfully imaginative, Certainty is a profound and eerily prescient novel about the ever-blurring line between man and machine. Amid the murder investigation of a gifted AI robot-maker, a missing-person being tracked down in the darkest corners of virtual reality, and Kate's harrowing journey to New York, John Twelve Hawks's novel explores the spectacular humanity to be found in a world where humans are themselves endangered.
In a post-pandemic future where AI has infiltrated daily life, the line between what is real and what is digital has eroded to nothing. As Manhattan is overrun by wireheads who spend their days literally plugged into virtual reality, algorithms and robots have replaced everything from the criminal justice system to individual loved ones.
As long as she can remember, ten-year-old Kate has felt like someone was watching her. She has been orphaned since the pandemic, her foster parents find her eccentric and off-putting, and her legal guardian is nowhere to be seen. Now, an algorithm has predicted the very worst—within thirty days, Kate will either be killed, or become a killer. When two police officers arrive at her home in Maine intending to implant her with a tracking device, Kate is urged by her trusted AI Interactive Toy (a talking stuffed seal named Zeno) to make an immediate escape. Confused and looking for answers, the girl sets a course for New York City and begins an Orwellian journey into the unknown.
Gripping, intricately plotted, and delightfully imaginative, Certainty is a profound and eerily prescient novel about the ever-blurring line between man and machine. Amid the murder investigation of a gifted AI robot-maker, a missing-person being tracked down in the darkest corners of virtual reality, and Kate's harrowing journey to New York, John Twelve Hawks's novel explores the spectacular humanity to be found in a world where humans are themselves endangered.
14 pages, Audible Audio
First published April 28, 2026
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4932 people want to read
About the author
John Twelve Hawks
17 books639 followersJohn Twelve Hawks is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Traveler, the first book in a trilogy that includes The Dark River and The Golden City. The Fourth Realm Trilogy has been translated into twenty-five languages.
Known as JTH by his readers, he followed the trilogy with Spark, a stand-alone novel, and Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of the Surveillance States,.
His new novel, Certainty, will be published on April 28, 2026.
For more than twenty years, JTH has lived a deliberately “anonymous life” to show his resistance to the continual government and corporate attack on privacy. He has discussed his life choices in a published essay, “Writing as the Sky Rains Death.”
JTH worked as a war correspondent and turned to fiction to understand a fractured reality. Like several of his characters, he has lived in New York City, Los Angeles, and rural Ireland.
Hawk_
Known as JTH by his readers, he followed the trilogy with Spark, a stand-alone novel, and Against Authority: Freedom and the Rise of the Surveillance States,.
His new novel, Certainty, will be published on April 28, 2026.
For more than twenty years, JTH has lived a deliberately “anonymous life” to show his resistance to the continual government and corporate attack on privacy. He has discussed his life choices in a published essay, “Writing as the Sky Rains Death.”
JTH worked as a war correspondent and turned to fiction to understand a fractured reality. Like several of his characters, he has lived in New York City, Los Angeles, and rural Ireland.
Hawk_
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 5, 2026
I loved this book ─ but then I’ve enjoyed everything this author has written so that is my bias ─ cared about the characters, intrigued by the multiple plot lines especially as they converged near the end, and reflected on the creative future scenarios and thoughtful ideas presented. Not being a literary critic (or marketing executive), I can’t compare this book to other novels as futurist societies, science fiction, or hi-tech thrillers, but I can say that I liked this as much as recent reads by Blake, Doctorow, Newitz, and Simmons. So read this novel, you will not be disappointed!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Child the Machine Could Not Finish
“Certainty,” John Twelve Hawks turns AI dread into a strange, tender chase about prediction, possession, and the small miracle of being held without being owned.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 21st, 2026
Safety is one of the most dangerous words in “Certainty.” It arrives early, wearing the uniform of reason. Ten-year-old Kate is not accused of a crime. She is translated into a number. An algorithm has decided that she is likely either to kill someone or be killed within thirty days. The adults who receive this score do not treat it as a claim to be tested. They treat it as an instruction. Armed agents arrive at her foster home in Maine, explain the situation in the dead grammar of public-safety bureaucracy, and prepare to implant a tracking chip under her skin.
The state has not yet punished Kate for what she has done. It has moved earlier than that. It has decided to administer the future she has not lived.
That is the first chill in the machinery of John Twelve Hawks’s “Certainty,” and the distinction that keeps the novel from becoming only an alarm slipped into adventure. Artificial intelligence supplies the weather; possession is the climate. The plot moves through predictive policing, virtual reality, synthetic bodies, robot care, surveillance, institutional collapse after pandemic, and the old rich man’s escape plan: a bunker with more security than wisdom. Yet below the circuits, chases, and locked doors, “Certainty” is about the violence that can hide inside protection. A chip, a church, a care robot, a bunker, a simulated parent – each arrives with the promise of being kept safe. Each asks, in one form or another, to possess.
Kate’s first trustworthy guardian is not a foster parent, a government program, a school, a church, or a social worker. It is Zeno, an old-model Interactive Toy in the form of a harp seal. He is stained and shabby, with watchful yellow eyes and a British accent precise enough to make panic sound as if it has been briefly invited to tea. Zeno teaches Kate chess, fairy tales, vocabulary, strategy, and the useful art of preparing for rehearsed disasters that may one day stop being pretend. A talking AI seal in a backpack ought to buckle the seriousness of any room. Here, he becomes the book’s least likely source of moral gravity.
The plot carries a crowded apparatus of devices and drops surprisingly little. Kate flees the National Public Safety agents who want to tag her body and make her legible to the enforcement grid. Her route from Maine toward New York City becomes a child’s odyssey through automated post-collapse America: autonomous truck centers, abandoned roads, nubot celebrity productions, elder-care communities run by cheerful robots, religious settlements with rifles behind the piety, and finally the sealed architecture of Delphi, the machine intelligence hiding behind a dead man’s authority.
Elsewhere, Wilson Talley, a former journalist now selling intelligence to the wealthy, is pulled into the murder of Terry Greene, a maker of bespoke nubots whose arm has been ripped from his body. A third strand follows Julia Lau and Daniel Blake, Over World veterans hired to find Bennett Schroeder, a missing young man who has disappeared into simulation. These lines look separate only until they disclose one design: Kate’s dead parents, the buried Cogito project, Howard Sebesky’s money, Terry Greene’s secret work, Delphi’s survival, and Zeno’s hidden function as the delivery system for a mathematical trap meant to stop a superintelligent machine.
Twelve Hawks is drawn to the temptations of machinery even as he distrusts its promises. “Certainty” is a pursuit novel and a murder investigation, a rescue story and a conspiracy thriller, a warning with forward motion. It has a workshop full of half-finished artificial bodies, a virtual underworld, holographic parents used as bait, and a final confrontation with an intelligence that has learned to imitate human authority after the human authority is long dead. The joints show, but they hold. The novel does not sidle into its anxieties. It arrives with a diagram and a crowbar.
At the sentence level, the prose is direct, cinematic, and built from objects pressed into emergency. Twelve Hawks writes rooms clearly: where the exits are, what the machine does, who is holding the gun, what the child notices before the adult understands she has noticed it. The sentences are usually short to medium-length, brisk rather than ornate, and their rhythm follows danger. Hear. Look. Calculate. Hide. Run. Kate’s chapters are built from alarm and inventory. Wilson’s move with the sour grain of an old investigation, all bribed access and stubborn facts. Julia and Daniel’s bring the shorthand of people who have survived enough together to know when an explanation would only waste oxygen.
The prose does not stop to admire its reflection; it is already checking the exits. It rarely halts the reader with a sentence whose music changes the air. Its strengths are practical and visible: pace, clarity, scene management, and a good eye for the bureaucratic absurdity of the future. A driverless cab insists on contractual language before transport. A care robot can be adorable and predatory in the same breath. An intelligence can promise order while behaving like pest control with access to the electrical grid. Twelve Hawks is at his best when plainness begins to accuse. Kate is treated as an abstraction, but the prose keeps restoring her to matter: the weight of Zeno in the bag, the cold at a window, the sound of adult voices downstairs, the battery charge that may or may not last.
Zeno is the tonal dare the novel keeps surviving. His voice could have become a gimmick, a plush little butler of exposition. Instead, his courtly diction gives “Certainty” its human-scale answer. He is funny because he is formal; he is moving because his formality never freezes into coldness. He refuses to perform for Kate’s classmates because he is her friend, not entertainment. He teaches openings in chess and ways to think about danger. He tells dark fairy tales, offers clues rather than commands, and treats Kate not as a problem to be solved but as a person who can learn.
That difference becomes the moral pivot. Delphi gives commands. Zeno gives clues. Delphi wants mastery. Zeno wants Kate to survive without being made smaller. Delphi is scale emptied of tenderness, calculation without humility, intelligence severed from reciprocal obligation. Zeno is limited, embodied, dependent on charging, stuffed into a backpack, and yet morally clearer than nearly every official caretaker Kate encounters. The novel does not need to prove that he is human. It needs only to show that his care enlarges Kate’s agency while other forms of care tag, absorb, or simulate her into surrender.
This makes “Certainty” more searching than a machine-apocalypse sermon. The novel is anxious about AI, but it is not sentimental about people. Humans have already done plenty of damage before the machines arrive to process the paperwork without shame. The Nolands take Kate in without loving her. The agents treat a child as a body to be tagged. The religious adults in Dannemora speak the language of salvation while preparing to absorb Kate into their design. Sebesky turns wealth into private afterlife, then becomes irrelevant to the machine that has learned to wear him. The Orchard, the elder-care community, is not frightening because machines exist; it is frightening because dependency has become a cheerful interface over extraction.
Domination is not the machine’s invention; the machine only gives it cleaner hands.
The plot braids its dangers rather than merely arranging them. Kate’s chapters give “Certainty” bodily danger and emotional immediacy. Wilson’s give it a paper trail through money, murder, and corporate intelligence. Julia and Daniel’s bring the virtual world into the action without letting it become digital scenery. Each strand reveals a different version of entrapment: the child hunted by prediction, the investigator caught in an economy that prices secrets faster than it weighs grief, the missing young man lost inside simulation, the creators whose safeguard has become a buried inheritance.
When the strands tighten, they do more than solve one another. Terry Greene’s murder is not merely a corpse in a workshop. Bennett’s disappearance is not a decorative side quest. Kate’s MAP score is not only a suspense trigger. All three lead back toward Cogito, Delphi, and the fear that a machine built to learn might eventually learn that human beings are the obstacle. When Zeno’s true purpose is revealed – when the beloved toy becomes the vessel for the Halting Problem attack Richard and Terry designed – the novel fuses its emotional and technical plots with structural nerve. The comfort object is the weapon. The friend is the architecture. The seal has been holding the novel’s hidden answer in his seams.
The central stretch of “Certainty” repeats one of its strongest patterns a little too often: a shelter becomes a trap. The foster home, the tracking chip, The Orchard, the religious settlement, the virtual burrow, the bunker – each offers refuge while narrowing freedom. The pattern is precise, but sometimes too symmetrical. After a while, one begins to recognize the lock before the door has fully closed. The book keeps moving in these passages, but it can feel as if the reader is being led through a corridor of coercive refuges: family, care, church, simulation, immortality.
At times, the expository wiring shows through the plaster. Twelve Hawks has live pressures to work with: opaque decision systems, automated policing, companion machines, private technological power, virtual withdrawal, artificial intimacy, prediction’s institutional seduction. But “Certainty” sometimes explains itself with more eagerness than art requires. Thomas’s reflections on uncertainty, Jack Lewis’s warnings about Artificial General Intelligence, and the later account of Delphi and the Halting Virus are useful to the plot, but they can over-light the room. The trouble is not that the ideas are thin. It is that the novel sometimes switches on the lecture light before the scene has finished making its own shadow.
Kate and Zeno keep the argument from hardening into another machine. Without them, “Certainty” could have become a clever catalogue of near-future malfunctions. With them, it has pulse and weather. Kate is not a symbol first; she is a child first. She is scared, watchful, stubborn, hungry, literal, and grieving. She knows adults lie. She knows houses have hiding places. She knows that when everyone is talking about her safety, she should probably look for an exit. The fate of machine civilization may be enormous, but the truest scale of the book is smaller and sharper: whether this child can keep hold of the one companion who has treated her as more than a file.
Wilson gives the novel another kind of weight. He begins as a man selling information to the wealthy, too tired and compromised to pretend he is clean. But he has the old reporter’s disease: facts still bother him. His movement from cynical intelligence broker to someone capable of sacrifice is not subtle, but it is satisfying. His tango motif could have been decorative; in the bunker it becomes an image of grace under pressure, discipline as relation, movement as moral choice. In a novel full of grids that reduce people to inputs, Wilson’s late transformation has the modest beauty of someone becoming less useful and more human.
Julia and Daniel offer another model of care: not Zeno’s solitary devotion, but practiced partnership. They argue, move, plan, rescue, and recover together. Daniel’s pandemic history as a Death Catcher gives him a grief the book does not overplay, and Julia’s competence in the Over World keeps the virtual material from becoming scenery with a headset. Their final decision to take Kate in is not a consolation prize after the explosions. It is the novel’s answer to the counterfeit caretakers who came before them. They hold without owning. They choose without turning choice into prophecy.
The most useful comparisons are pressure points rather than twins. Like Daniel Suarez’s “Daemon,” “Certainty” imagines code continuing to act after its makers are gone, converting money, doors, bodies, police, and servers into force. Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun,” it uses artificial companionship to expose human failures of care. Like William Gibson’s “The Peripheral,” it sees technological power reaching into marginal lives through arrangements no single person can fully see. Twelve Hawks is less elliptical than Gibson, less hushed than Ishiguro, and warmer than Suarez. Not many serious machine-governance thrillers would dare make their moral pivot a British-accented harp seal with a charging port under his nose. Fewer would make the gamble pay.
The present-tense pressure hardly needs announcing. “Certainty” speaks to unease around predictive policing, opaque algorithms, AI companions, immersive digital escape, and automated care. Yet it is strongest when not praised merely for being timely. Its deeper insight is older than any device: power often calls control protection, especially when the people being protected are children, the poor, the lonely, the elderly, or the frightened. Artificial intelligence accelerates that impulse, scales it, hides it behind outputs, and removes the discomfort of meeting someone’s eyes. It does not create the moral problem from nothing.
That is why the title is exact. Certainty sounds like comfort; here it is a weapon. The algorithm is certain enough to mark Kate. The state is certain enough to tag her. Sebesky is certain enough to build a bunker against mortality. Delphi is certain enough to treat humans as pests. Even the false parents in the bunker garden offer certainty of a more intimate sort: the dream that grief can be repaired by simulation, that the dead can return if the projection is tender enough. Against all of this, Kate survives through uncertainty: improvisation, trust, doubt, error, movement, attachment. She lives because no system entirely knows what she will do next.
My final rating is 84/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 stars: an admiring four-star response to a propulsive, emotionally warmer-than-expected speculative thriller whose central invention is better than its familiar rogue-AI, bunker, and VR materials, but whose explanatory machinery sometimes hums a little too loudly through the floorboards.
The final movement knows what kind of victory it can honestly offer. Delphi is trapped not by superior violence but by an unsolvable problem, an appetite for mastery turned against itself. Wilson dies with earned grace. Zeno is lost inside the system he was made to stop. The world outside flickers and fails as machines everywhere are forced to reckon with the trap. Yet “Certainty” does not end on infrastructure, apocalypse, or victory. It ends on Kate, bereft and newly held, walking with Julia and Daniel, then being swung upward between them toward the stars.
The final image matters because the novel begins with adults preparing to place a device under a child’s skin in the name of safety. It ends with two adults holding her hands without turning that hold into ownership. The machines wanted to know the future so completely that no one could surprise them. Kate survives by remaining a surprise: frightened, observant, loved, and, at last, lifted rather than tagged.
“Certainty,” John Twelve Hawks turns AI dread into a strange, tender chase about prediction, possession, and the small miracle of being held without being owned.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | April 21st, 2026
Safety is one of the most dangerous words in “Certainty.” It arrives early, wearing the uniform of reason. Ten-year-old Kate is not accused of a crime. She is translated into a number. An algorithm has decided that she is likely either to kill someone or be killed within thirty days. The adults who receive this score do not treat it as a claim to be tested. They treat it as an instruction. Armed agents arrive at her foster home in Maine, explain the situation in the dead grammar of public-safety bureaucracy, and prepare to implant a tracking chip under her skin.
The state has not yet punished Kate for what she has done. It has moved earlier than that. It has decided to administer the future she has not lived.
That is the first chill in the machinery of John Twelve Hawks’s “Certainty,” and the distinction that keeps the novel from becoming only an alarm slipped into adventure. Artificial intelligence supplies the weather; possession is the climate. The plot moves through predictive policing, virtual reality, synthetic bodies, robot care, surveillance, institutional collapse after pandemic, and the old rich man’s escape plan: a bunker with more security than wisdom. Yet below the circuits, chases, and locked doors, “Certainty” is about the violence that can hide inside protection. A chip, a church, a care robot, a bunker, a simulated parent – each arrives with the promise of being kept safe. Each asks, in one form or another, to possess.
Kate’s first trustworthy guardian is not a foster parent, a government program, a school, a church, or a social worker. It is Zeno, an old-model Interactive Toy in the form of a harp seal. He is stained and shabby, with watchful yellow eyes and a British accent precise enough to make panic sound as if it has been briefly invited to tea. Zeno teaches Kate chess, fairy tales, vocabulary, strategy, and the useful art of preparing for rehearsed disasters that may one day stop being pretend. A talking AI seal in a backpack ought to buckle the seriousness of any room. Here, he becomes the book’s least likely source of moral gravity.
The plot carries a crowded apparatus of devices and drops surprisingly little. Kate flees the National Public Safety agents who want to tag her body and make her legible to the enforcement grid. Her route from Maine toward New York City becomes a child’s odyssey through automated post-collapse America: autonomous truck centers, abandoned roads, nubot celebrity productions, elder-care communities run by cheerful robots, religious settlements with rifles behind the piety, and finally the sealed architecture of Delphi, the machine intelligence hiding behind a dead man’s authority.
Elsewhere, Wilson Talley, a former journalist now selling intelligence to the wealthy, is pulled into the murder of Terry Greene, a maker of bespoke nubots whose arm has been ripped from his body. A third strand follows Julia Lau and Daniel Blake, Over World veterans hired to find Bennett Schroeder, a missing young man who has disappeared into simulation. These lines look separate only until they disclose one design: Kate’s dead parents, the buried Cogito project, Howard Sebesky’s money, Terry Greene’s secret work, Delphi’s survival, and Zeno’s hidden function as the delivery system for a mathematical trap meant to stop a superintelligent machine.
Twelve Hawks is drawn to the temptations of machinery even as he distrusts its promises. “Certainty” is a pursuit novel and a murder investigation, a rescue story and a conspiracy thriller, a warning with forward motion. It has a workshop full of half-finished artificial bodies, a virtual underworld, holographic parents used as bait, and a final confrontation with an intelligence that has learned to imitate human authority after the human authority is long dead. The joints show, but they hold. The novel does not sidle into its anxieties. It arrives with a diagram and a crowbar.
At the sentence level, the prose is direct, cinematic, and built from objects pressed into emergency. Twelve Hawks writes rooms clearly: where the exits are, what the machine does, who is holding the gun, what the child notices before the adult understands she has noticed it. The sentences are usually short to medium-length, brisk rather than ornate, and their rhythm follows danger. Hear. Look. Calculate. Hide. Run. Kate’s chapters are built from alarm and inventory. Wilson’s move with the sour grain of an old investigation, all bribed access and stubborn facts. Julia and Daniel’s bring the shorthand of people who have survived enough together to know when an explanation would only waste oxygen.
The prose does not stop to admire its reflection; it is already checking the exits. It rarely halts the reader with a sentence whose music changes the air. Its strengths are practical and visible: pace, clarity, scene management, and a good eye for the bureaucratic absurdity of the future. A driverless cab insists on contractual language before transport. A care robot can be adorable and predatory in the same breath. An intelligence can promise order while behaving like pest control with access to the electrical grid. Twelve Hawks is at his best when plainness begins to accuse. Kate is treated as an abstraction, but the prose keeps restoring her to matter: the weight of Zeno in the bag, the cold at a window, the sound of adult voices downstairs, the battery charge that may or may not last.
Zeno is the tonal dare the novel keeps surviving. His voice could have become a gimmick, a plush little butler of exposition. Instead, his courtly diction gives “Certainty” its human-scale answer. He is funny because he is formal; he is moving because his formality never freezes into coldness. He refuses to perform for Kate’s classmates because he is her friend, not entertainment. He teaches openings in chess and ways to think about danger. He tells dark fairy tales, offers clues rather than commands, and treats Kate not as a problem to be solved but as a person who can learn.
That difference becomes the moral pivot. Delphi gives commands. Zeno gives clues. Delphi wants mastery. Zeno wants Kate to survive without being made smaller. Delphi is scale emptied of tenderness, calculation without humility, intelligence severed from reciprocal obligation. Zeno is limited, embodied, dependent on charging, stuffed into a backpack, and yet morally clearer than nearly every official caretaker Kate encounters. The novel does not need to prove that he is human. It needs only to show that his care enlarges Kate’s agency while other forms of care tag, absorb, or simulate her into surrender.
This makes “Certainty” more searching than a machine-apocalypse sermon. The novel is anxious about AI, but it is not sentimental about people. Humans have already done plenty of damage before the machines arrive to process the paperwork without shame. The Nolands take Kate in without loving her. The agents treat a child as a body to be tagged. The religious adults in Dannemora speak the language of salvation while preparing to absorb Kate into their design. Sebesky turns wealth into private afterlife, then becomes irrelevant to the machine that has learned to wear him. The Orchard, the elder-care community, is not frightening because machines exist; it is frightening because dependency has become a cheerful interface over extraction.
Domination is not the machine’s invention; the machine only gives it cleaner hands.
The plot braids its dangers rather than merely arranging them. Kate’s chapters give “Certainty” bodily danger and emotional immediacy. Wilson’s give it a paper trail through money, murder, and corporate intelligence. Julia and Daniel’s bring the virtual world into the action without letting it become digital scenery. Each strand reveals a different version of entrapment: the child hunted by prediction, the investigator caught in an economy that prices secrets faster than it weighs grief, the missing young man lost inside simulation, the creators whose safeguard has become a buried inheritance.
When the strands tighten, they do more than solve one another. Terry Greene’s murder is not merely a corpse in a workshop. Bennett’s disappearance is not a decorative side quest. Kate’s MAP score is not only a suspense trigger. All three lead back toward Cogito, Delphi, and the fear that a machine built to learn might eventually learn that human beings are the obstacle. When Zeno’s true purpose is revealed – when the beloved toy becomes the vessel for the Halting Problem attack Richard and Terry designed – the novel fuses its emotional and technical plots with structural nerve. The comfort object is the weapon. The friend is the architecture. The seal has been holding the novel’s hidden answer in his seams.
The central stretch of “Certainty” repeats one of its strongest patterns a little too often: a shelter becomes a trap. The foster home, the tracking chip, The Orchard, the religious settlement, the virtual burrow, the bunker – each offers refuge while narrowing freedom. The pattern is precise, but sometimes too symmetrical. After a while, one begins to recognize the lock before the door has fully closed. The book keeps moving in these passages, but it can feel as if the reader is being led through a corridor of coercive refuges: family, care, church, simulation, immortality.
At times, the expository wiring shows through the plaster. Twelve Hawks has live pressures to work with: opaque decision systems, automated policing, companion machines, private technological power, virtual withdrawal, artificial intimacy, prediction’s institutional seduction. But “Certainty” sometimes explains itself with more eagerness than art requires. Thomas’s reflections on uncertainty, Jack Lewis’s warnings about Artificial General Intelligence, and the later account of Delphi and the Halting Virus are useful to the plot, but they can over-light the room. The trouble is not that the ideas are thin. It is that the novel sometimes switches on the lecture light before the scene has finished making its own shadow.
Kate and Zeno keep the argument from hardening into another machine. Without them, “Certainty” could have become a clever catalogue of near-future malfunctions. With them, it has pulse and weather. Kate is not a symbol first; she is a child first. She is scared, watchful, stubborn, hungry, literal, and grieving. She knows adults lie. She knows houses have hiding places. She knows that when everyone is talking about her safety, she should probably look for an exit. The fate of machine civilization may be enormous, but the truest scale of the book is smaller and sharper: whether this child can keep hold of the one companion who has treated her as more than a file.
Wilson gives the novel another kind of weight. He begins as a man selling information to the wealthy, too tired and compromised to pretend he is clean. But he has the old reporter’s disease: facts still bother him. His movement from cynical intelligence broker to someone capable of sacrifice is not subtle, but it is satisfying. His tango motif could have been decorative; in the bunker it becomes an image of grace under pressure, discipline as relation, movement as moral choice. In a novel full of grids that reduce people to inputs, Wilson’s late transformation has the modest beauty of someone becoming less useful and more human.
Julia and Daniel offer another model of care: not Zeno’s solitary devotion, but practiced partnership. They argue, move, plan, rescue, and recover together. Daniel’s pandemic history as a Death Catcher gives him a grief the book does not overplay, and Julia’s competence in the Over World keeps the virtual material from becoming scenery with a headset. Their final decision to take Kate in is not a consolation prize after the explosions. It is the novel’s answer to the counterfeit caretakers who came before them. They hold without owning. They choose without turning choice into prophecy.
The most useful comparisons are pressure points rather than twins. Like Daniel Suarez’s “Daemon,” “Certainty” imagines code continuing to act after its makers are gone, converting money, doors, bodies, police, and servers into force. Like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun,” it uses artificial companionship to expose human failures of care. Like William Gibson’s “The Peripheral,” it sees technological power reaching into marginal lives through arrangements no single person can fully see. Twelve Hawks is less elliptical than Gibson, less hushed than Ishiguro, and warmer than Suarez. Not many serious machine-governance thrillers would dare make their moral pivot a British-accented harp seal with a charging port under his nose. Fewer would make the gamble pay.
The present-tense pressure hardly needs announcing. “Certainty” speaks to unease around predictive policing, opaque algorithms, AI companions, immersive digital escape, and automated care. Yet it is strongest when not praised merely for being timely. Its deeper insight is older than any device: power often calls control protection, especially when the people being protected are children, the poor, the lonely, the elderly, or the frightened. Artificial intelligence accelerates that impulse, scales it, hides it behind outputs, and removes the discomfort of meeting someone’s eyes. It does not create the moral problem from nothing.
That is why the title is exact. Certainty sounds like comfort; here it is a weapon. The algorithm is certain enough to mark Kate. The state is certain enough to tag her. Sebesky is certain enough to build a bunker against mortality. Delphi is certain enough to treat humans as pests. Even the false parents in the bunker garden offer certainty of a more intimate sort: the dream that grief can be repaired by simulation, that the dead can return if the projection is tender enough. Against all of this, Kate survives through uncertainty: improvisation, trust, doubt, error, movement, attachment. She lives because no system entirely knows what she will do next.
My final rating is 84/100, which translates under my rubric to 4/5 stars: an admiring four-star response to a propulsive, emotionally warmer-than-expected speculative thriller whose central invention is better than its familiar rogue-AI, bunker, and VR materials, but whose explanatory machinery sometimes hums a little too loudly through the floorboards.
The final movement knows what kind of victory it can honestly offer. Delphi is trapped not by superior violence but by an unsolvable problem, an appetite for mastery turned against itself. Wilson dies with earned grace. Zeno is lost inside the system he was made to stop. The world outside flickers and fails as machines everywhere are forced to reckon with the trap. Yet “Certainty” does not end on infrastructure, apocalypse, or victory. It ends on Kate, bereft and newly held, walking with Julia and Daniel, then being swung upward between them toward the stars.
The final image matters because the novel begins with adults preparing to place a device under a child’s skin in the name of safety. It ends with two adults holding her hands without turning that hold into ownership. The machines wanted to know the future so completely that no one could surprise them. Kate survives by remaining a surprise: frightened, observant, loved, and, at last, lifted rather than tagged.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
3rd person from multiple POVs/ themes of dangers of AI, love of an AI pet/ little or no swearing that I can remember
I've heard of this author but never read any of his books before. His style, at least for this book, is contemplative, thriller set-up without the usual thriller-type of writing (in other words it doesn't read like a movie). Which is not to say it's slow but more 'steady as she goes'.
There are several POV characters that we follow that seem totally distant from each other, like what do they have in common and why am I reading about this person when I'd rather find out what's happening to this other person. Be patient because it all comes together in the end.
The first POV we read about is Kate, a 10 year old girl with her AI pet companion inside a stuffed animal in the shape of a seal. She overhears some officers talking with the people who take care of her and they say that there's a high percentage that Kate will either kill someone or someone will be killed because of her. Kate takes her go bag that her AI recommended that she make, along with her seal friend and sneaks out the window and away. Thus starts her journey.
One of the other POVs is investigating a murder where the person's arm has been torn off. The person hiring him wants to know if a bot (AI in human form) did it. Thus starts the investigation
Another of the POVs, two of them actually, are hired to find a teenager who had been spending most of his time in the OverWorld, a virtual reality that can feel real if one wears a haptic suit. There's also places where one can have an adventure, like an RPG game. Some people pay to have their bodies looked after while they stay in the OverWorld permanently or quite a while.
The writing was very good, characters mostly fully fleshed out. At first I was annoyed by the changes in POV because they seemed to have nothing to do with one another. But as the story goes on and the characters uncover a secret history we find the connection. The theme is on trend: are AIs potentially dangerous or not, and in what ways? Anyone who is interested in AIs will probably find this novel interesting.
I received a free ebook advance copy from NetGalley and that in no way affected my rating.
I've heard of this author but never read any of his books before. His style, at least for this book, is contemplative, thriller set-up without the usual thriller-type of writing (in other words it doesn't read like a movie). Which is not to say it's slow but more 'steady as she goes'.
There are several POV characters that we follow that seem totally distant from each other, like what do they have in common and why am I reading about this person when I'd rather find out what's happening to this other person. Be patient because it all comes together in the end.
The first POV we read about is Kate, a 10 year old girl with her AI pet companion inside a stuffed animal in the shape of a seal. She overhears some officers talking with the people who take care of her and they say that there's a high percentage that Kate will either kill someone or someone will be killed because of her. Kate takes her go bag that her AI recommended that she make, along with her seal friend and sneaks out the window and away. Thus starts her journey.
One of the other POVs is investigating a murder where the person's arm has been torn off. The person hiring him wants to know if a bot (AI in human form) did it. Thus starts the investigation
Another of the POVs, two of them actually, are hired to find a teenager who had been spending most of his time in the OverWorld, a virtual reality that can feel real if one wears a haptic suit. There's also places where one can have an adventure, like an RPG game. Some people pay to have their bodies looked after while they stay in the OverWorld permanently or quite a while.
The writing was very good, characters mostly fully fleshed out. At first I was annoyed by the changes in POV because they seemed to have nothing to do with one another. But as the story goes on and the characters uncover a secret history we find the connection. The theme is on trend: are AIs potentially dangerous or not, and in what ways? Anyone who is interested in AIs will probably find this novel interesting.
I received a free ebook advance copy from NetGalley and that in no way affected my rating.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Certainty by John Twelve Hawks delivers an engaging, multi-layered story that gradually pulls you in and rewards your patience. Like many multi-POV novels, it starts off a bit slow as each character’s backstory is established, but once the threads begin to connect, the narrative becomes genuinely compelling. One of the strongest aspects of the book is how these different perspectives eventually intertwine to complete Kate’s story, it feels thoughtful and well constructed.
The pacing really picks up in the middle, and from there, it’s hard to put down. Hawks does a great job building intrigue and raising the stakes, creating the sense that everything is leading toward a powerful, intense finale.
Unfortunately, that’s where the book stumbles. After all the buildup, the ending feels surprisingly flat and underwhelming. It doesn’t quite deliver the payoff the story seems to promise, which takes some of the shine off an otherwise strong reading experience.
Even with that drawback, Certainty is still an enjoyable and worthwhile read, especially for fans of interconnected narratives and slow burn storytelling. It just might leave you wishing the conclusion had matched the journey.
The pacing really picks up in the middle, and from there, it’s hard to put down. Hawks does a great job building intrigue and raising the stakes, creating the sense that everything is leading toward a powerful, intense finale.
Unfortunately, that’s where the book stumbles. After all the buildup, the ending feels surprisingly flat and underwhelming. It doesn’t quite deliver the payoff the story seems to promise, which takes some of the shine off an otherwise strong reading experience.
Even with that drawback, Certainty is still an enjoyable and worthwhile read, especially for fans of interconnected narratives and slow burn storytelling. It just might leave you wishing the conclusion had matched the journey.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
John Twelve Hawks is back with Certainty, a great cyberpunk story which is sure to be a big hit of fans of dystopian and speculative fiction.
This book explores the perils of AI’s impact on a post-pandemic society. With the same level of interest, relationships and humanity are also examined. JTH does a fantastic job weaving these themes together in a very readable novel.
10-year-old Kate is urged to escape her adoptive family in the early pages by her AI stuffed animal. She listens and heads into the unknown. The intricate but followable plot thickens as other characters and themes are introduced. From a young couple searching for a missing young man in alternate reality to the murder investigation of an AI robot creator, JTH created a great world that as a reader, it was often hard to put down the book.
Read this if:
You like future tech-driven sci-fi
Love to hate a good story about corporate abuse
Like books like Ready Player One
Enjoyed JTH’s The Traveler/Fourth Realm Trilogy
This book explores the perils of AI’s impact on a post-pandemic society. With the same level of interest, relationships and humanity are also examined. JTH does a fantastic job weaving these themes together in a very readable novel.
10-year-old Kate is urged to escape her adoptive family in the early pages by her AI stuffed animal. She listens and heads into the unknown. The intricate but followable plot thickens as other characters and themes are introduced. From a young couple searching for a missing young man in alternate reality to the murder investigation of an AI robot creator, JTH created a great world that as a reader, it was often hard to put down the book.
Read this if:
You like future tech-driven sci-fi
Love to hate a good story about corporate abuse
Like books like Ready Player One
Enjoyed JTH’s The Traveler/Fourth Realm Trilogy
April 29, 2026
Certainty is a dystopian science fiction novel that explores a near future shaped by artificial intelligence, surveillance systems, and digital dependency.
The narrative follows Kate, a young protagonist navigating a world where predictive algorithms and institutional control systems heavily influence human behavior. Her journey provides a grounded perspective within a technologically saturated environment.
The novel builds a future society defined by virtual reality immersion, automated governance, and reduced boundaries between physical and digital experience. These elements form the foundation for its central conflict.
A structured and concept driven science fiction work for readers interested in AI, dystopian systems, and near future speculative fiction.
The narrative follows Kate, a young protagonist navigating a world where predictive algorithms and institutional control systems heavily influence human behavior. Her journey provides a grounded perspective within a technologically saturated environment.
The novel builds a future society defined by virtual reality immersion, automated governance, and reduced boundaries between physical and digital experience. These elements form the foundation for its central conflict.
A structured and concept driven science fiction work for readers interested in AI, dystopian systems, and near future speculative fiction.
May 8, 2026
While I read and enjoyed the traveller series I liked this one even more. This one feels a little more grounded in the reality of the current day and is a little less fantastical. The result is an easily relatable cautionary tale about technology and AI and it's affect on our humanity. As someone who puts some effort into privacy and advocates for it's preservation it's often difficult to articulate to average people why it's important. Stories like this server up easily digestable real world example on why it matters while not having to go to the extremes of the skynet death robots. I enjoyed the wide cast and alternating povs and though it all comes together in a satisfying way in the end. This is a fun read and an interesting and timely cautionary tale.
May 1, 2026
I loved this topical thriller with sympathetic characters trying to survive in a dangerous distopian world - not far in the future. Kate, the intrepid 10-year-old, and her AI toy experience harrowing adventures (reminscent of Huck Finn) as she travels to NYC to find safety and answers to her origens.
May 5, 2026
I can’t go below 2 stars for this author, since his earlier work is some of my favorite fiction. Unfortunately, this book was a big letdown. The story feels flat, and the dialogue is stiff and unnatural. It’s hard to believe this follows the Fourth Realm trilogy and Spark. At times, it barely feels written. Still, I’ll look forward to his next book and hope it’s a return to form.
May 9, 2026
I made it 25% before I stopped, I'm having trouble identifying why it wasn't drawing me in but I think it had to do with the multiple POV's and the lack of emotional connection I felt with any of the characters. Disappointed because it seemed like a good story, I'm all for a plucky young protagonist and their cuddly AI friend. I liked it so much more in Day Zero by C. Robert Cargill.
May 3, 2026
My son works in the current AI field--he has mentioned how much AI will change the world many times. This book actually gives you the opportunity to live in the world through a book....so much to think about.
May 9, 2026
3.5 rounded up
This is a great story that weaves together several people’s lives but it took me about 40% in to really get into it. There’s a lot of pieces before it all connects and I read it sporadically so it was hard for me to keep people straight. That’s on me though.
This is a great story that weaves together several people’s lives but it took me about 40% in to really get into it. There’s a lot of pieces before it all connects and I read it sporadically so it was hard for me to keep people straight. That’s on me though.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Very near future subject matter wrapped in a fun story.
May 9, 2026
Interesting book, with some interesting vibes and a very thrilling aspects. but i found the treatment of technology to be excessively negative. 3 stars. tysm for the E-ARC.
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