“Time-travel is impossible... too many problems with paradoxes, and besides, if it was possible, where's the evidence of people visiting various periods of time? However, with modern technology, in the very near future (2012), they find that they can copy a particular consciousness and send it back in time to take over a dying person's brain (dying, because they must get effectively blank the other person's brain in order to inhabit it, effectively killing the personality, and because it's less likely to cause any paradoxes that could change the course of events). So, when a wealthy organization decides that it’s in their interest to look into the direful predictions in a recently discovered Mayan Codex, they attempt to send a copy of Jed DeLanda's consciousness back to 664 and the courts of the ancient Maya in an attempt to discover more about what they knew.
Jed is a quirky and strange protagonist, to be sure. He's a brilliant mathematician with admitted personality problems. He doesn't empathize well, perhaps because he was ethnically Maya and orphaned at a young age when his parents were killed by one of the many campaigns against his people, and brought up via various Mormon agencies seeking to aid native people. So PTSD could account for some of his wildly irreverent behavior. But one of the things he brings to the table is his ability with a Mayan Sacrifice Game that he was taught as a child. It is thought that the game, all but extinct in the present, was critical to determining the prophecies of the Codex.
Jed had been having success applying the Game to the commodities markets, but the desire to reconnect to the lost past of his roots drives him to contact the scientist/researcher Taro Mora who has been studying the Game and who is being bankrolled by the aforementioned corporation. On a practice run using the Game , Jed and the others on the project determine that one of the events noted in the Codex would likely occur nearby them in Florida, and indeed, a horrific terrorist attack happens, from which Jed and noted game designer Marena Park, who is in charge of the project, and her young son barely escape. This event pushes them all on to actually sending a part of Jed back in time.
Back in the past, Jed's time inhabiting one of the Maya is a total roller-coaster (as if escaping from a terrorist attack wasn't bad enough). The description of the people and the cities was convincingly alien and fantastical. His adventures, grueling and action-filled.
This book is LONG and at times rambling, but there is suspense and excitement and adventure to spare, whether back in time, trying to save himself from sacrifice and death, and hoping to find some clues that may avert the major disaster that may occur in 2012, or back in the future, dealing with mysterious corporations and government entities and crazies out to end the world. It's also a smart story, with a mix of science and math and theory, as well as history, which suits the quirky genius of Jed and the other scientists and their attempt to save the world. And it's a smart-ass story, with Jed's bizarrely unsocialized personality and wise-cracks and multiple references to everything in pop culture (and literature, the sciences and history), as well as games--those electronic ones popular with kids today and those used to make ancient prophecies. I was completely fascinated with it all and am curious about what happens next. The story arc is concluded in a major way in this book, but the author clearly means for there to be a sequel, with a little twist added at the end.
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aprillee wrote this review Wednesday, July 8 2009.
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