Firstly I
must say that I really enjoyed reading this book. At 629 pages long it’s one of
the longest books I’ve read for a while but that’s only because the text is
large and well spaced. A testimony to how much I enjoyed it is that it only
took me a few days to crank through it and I struggled to put it down most of
the time.
The Mayan Prophecy follows the story of
Dominique Vasquez and, I can only imagine the symbolically named, Michael
Gabriel (yes, not one angel reference but two) as they quest to save humanity
from the end of the world. The plot goes into the reasons why the Mayan
calendar ends in May 2012 and it’s actually quite well constructed in terms of
reasoning. The main plot point focuses around the fact that it wasn’t actually
an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. It was actually an alien spaceship that
has been lying dormant at the bottom of the ocean. It’s sending out a distress
beacon which can only be picked up when the planets line up in a certain way which
happens once every several thousand years but is stopped because some other
aliens, who helped us build the pyramids and other shit, have prevented them
from doing so. Until now.
There are a
few popular culture references but because the book was written in 2001
depicting events in 2012, there is some creative license here. For example he
writes about a Rolling Stones album called Past Our Prime and Dominique has a
car that can test your alcohol level before you drive.
Despite my
overall opinion that it’s a good book there were a lot of things that irked me.
On page four we kick off with horrendous spelling errors where the non-word
‘qreat’ is used instead of ‘great’. Now, this section of the book is from a
journal of one of the characters so it could be argued that this is the
portrayal of typed up handwriting. However, even if this is the premise, I
don’t agree with it. If you are going to write something for someone else to
read, so not a journal, then spell the words right.
On page 56,
there is a face scanner which is used to access a health facility as a security
precaution. But it’s not referenced again or cleverly bypassed by taking off
someone’s face or head to use it so it’s completely redundant in terms of the
story. I’m not if this is meant to be another futuristic prediction over security
protocols, but I’m sure this could have been less grandiose if so.
Some of the
mathematics while fascinating, is not easy on the eyes and at one point, I
found myself wondering if what I was reading was actually correct in terms of
sentence structure. Unfortunately, Steve Alten doesn’t have a Clive Cussler
character around to explain it to the dumbasses like me. One thing I do know
though is that light years is a measure of distance, not time. Yet one of the
doctor/scientist characters is either making a joke or doesn’t know this when
they refer to light years as a measure of time.
There was
one more major error I picked up on towards the middle of the book. Michael has
magic sneakers that get written off of his feet but then magically get put back
on again. And he ends up going barefoot through the alien spaceship. I’m not
sure this is the best choice when journeying in to the unknown but to each
their own, I guess.
The only
other thing I noted was the dialogue kind of falls apart in the second half of
the book. It’s almost like the characters stop caring about making sense with
their dialogue. That said, it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the story and
I will definitely get the second one to see where it goes.
The Mayan Prophecy by Steve Alten was
first published as Domain by Tor in
2001. RRP £6.99 (Paperback)
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