A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel
about the days leading up to December 21, 2012—the day the
Maya predicted the world would end
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.
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