2009; 679 pages. Genre : Apocalyptic Fiction; Alternate History. Overall Rating : B+.
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"Beware December 21, 2012!" said the Mayan codex, and no one in the present world took it very seriously. But it also said December 23, 2011 would be a "warm-up" calamitous day, and when that prophecy came true, it was suddenly very important to somehow go back to 664 AD (when the codex was written) and learn about, or even alter, the prophecy.
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What's To Like...
It's got time-travel and alternate history, so you know I'm gonna like it. The storyline moves at a good pace. It's a vocabulary smorgasbord, including lots of German, Spanish, and Ch'olan (Mayan) expressions. D'Amato takes time to bring to light some of the modern-day issues faced by the Mayan descendants in Guatemala - repression, executions, loss of identity, and eviction from their lands. The "travel back in time" technology is clever and believable; as is the prophecying mechanism, a Go-like game called "The Sacrifice".
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I also liked the writing style. It's first-person and has a Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) tone. The protagonist, Jed, has some amazing talents. Give him any date in time and he'll instantly tell you what day it falls on. Or throw a handful of seeds in front of him, and right away he'll tell you exactly how many there are. But said gifts don't have much practical use, and if you bring Jed along on a dangerous mission, he's more of a liability than an asset.
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The best part of ITCOTS is the details. Hey. if you're going to set a story in 7th-century Mexico, I want to hear about every aspect of daily life there - the plants and the animals, the clothing and the culture, the weapons and the pastimes, the politics and the mind-sets.
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OTOH, it does take about 100 pages for the book to get going. And the "mathematical proof" of time travel and the details of playing the Sacrifice Game can get a bit tedious. The ending is logical, but seems a sconch abrupt.
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New/Kewl Words...
There's a bunch of them. Here are a few...
Misprisions : Misinterpretations. Anhedonic : A loss of the sense of smell. Homunculus : A very small, but fully-developed human. Eidetic : Involving extraordinarily accurate and vivid recall. Loblolly : used in the phrase 'loblolly pine' here, but as a stand-alone, it means "a mudhole".
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Excerpt...
I thought I could hear asteroids screeching toward the earth, that I could feel the friction between tectonic plates, the energy building up in granite watch-springs, that I could watch gravity - which is a kind of mulberry-purple color - spreading out from the earth and bunching into dark stars and draining into the abscesses in existence, and that even the black holes were visible in a way, silhouetted against drifts of interstellar dust balls. (pg. 674)
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Q. : How long should an Alternate-History book be?
Answer : long enough to tell the story properly, and give enough details about the setting to where it feels "real".
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ITCOTS does this nicely, much to the consternation of various reviewers that complained it was too long. Personally, I liked the book because it wasn't "dumbed down". This is not a quick read. And yeah, D'Amato could have left out the detailed descriptions and told the story in 500 pages. But then readers would gripe that it didn't have a "real" feel to it.
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So we'll give ITCOTS a "B+", and recommend it to anyone who's tired of reading Alt-History stories written at an 8th-grade level. If this is the future of the genre, then I'm all for it.
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