In the Courts of the Sun

by Brian D'Amato Narrated by Robertson Dean

Overview

December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game-once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures-that his mother taught him. But Jed's life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex.



Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a "sacrifice game" described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king.



Only something goes wrong. Instead of becoming a king, Jed arrives inside a ballplayer named Chacal who is seconds away from throwing himself down the temple steps as a human sacrifice. If Jed can live through the next few minutes, he might just save the world.



Bringing to mind Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Gary Jennings's Aztec, yet entirely unique, In the Courts of the Sun takes you from the distant past to the near future in a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Fans of the late Michael Crichton will welcome this engrossing SF thriller, the first in a projected trilogy by D'Amato (Beauty). As December 12, 2012, the date the Maya predicted would mark the end of the world, approaches, the Warren Group, a shadowy conglomerate, seeks to use technological advances to forestall disaster. One way is to send the mind of Jed DeLanda, a savant skilled at a contemporary version of the Mayas' sacrifice game, into the body of a seventh-century Mayan hip-ball player to learn more about why the apocalyptic prediction was made. DeLanda's time-travel comes just as a devastating calamity, possibly triggered by biological weapons, hits Orlando, Fla. The action shifts easily between the near-future and the past. While the use of modern idiom in the historical scenes may take some getting used to, the period details are as convincing as those in Simon Levack's superb Aztec mysteries (The Demon of the Air, etc.). (Mar.)

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Library Journal

The Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, and many wonder what will happen on that fateful day. That is the question D'Amato (Beauty) examines in this sprawling tome. Familiar with a game that the Mayans used to predict the future, Jed Deland successfully makes money on the stock market using the same methods. He ends up helping an organization with access to time-travel technology so that he can travel back at the height of the Mayan civilization, interact with these ancient people, and find out what the world can expect when the calendar ends. Not a thriller, a work of science fiction, or a historical, this novel is hard to define. End-of-the-world aficionados will find it compelling, but librarians will have a hard time booktalking it. It also ends with the dreaded four words: End of Book One. Will the entire series be published before the apocalypse? For larger collections only. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/08.]
—Jeff Ayers

From the Publisher

"A remarkable, unique, stand-out book…. In a word: awesome. Or brilliant. Make that two words: awesome and brilliant." ---Raymond Khoury, author of The Last Templar and The Sanctuary

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171268503
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	08/20/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

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