Friday, July 31, 2009

A new fiction about the end of the world in 2012

The Year 2012 Bandwagon is getting a lot more crowded. Artist Brian D'Amato's novel In the Courts of the Sun (2009) weighs in at a hefty 882 pages. It's only volume 1 of a trilogy called the Sacrifice Game Trilogy. The second volume will appear in 2010. The dustjack copy erroneously compares the first volume to Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon -- I think a more apt comparison would be Stephenson's own historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle, though Cryptonomicon like D'Amato's novel does yo-yo between the past and present -- Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths and Gary Jennings Aztec.