The 2012 Countdown

Thanks to the new hit movie, 2012 is a hot topic. Plenty of recently
released books have used the countdown to 2012, the year the Mayan calendar
comes to an end, as a setting or plot point for their novels. One of the
latest is author Brian D'Amato.

Here's what D'Amato had to say about his book, In the Courts of the Sun, the first in a trilogy from Dutton:

There are a lot of things I wanted the reader to get from my book In the
Courts of the Sun and from the whole Sacrifice Game series. Regarding the
2012 phenomenon, I wanted to offer an entirely different take on it—one that
would not partake of either New-Age nonsense (for example, that on December
21st, 2012 we’re going to enter a new Aquarian age of peace, love, and
voluntary socialism, with a global constitution written by John Lennon) or
the predictions of sell-by-date disaster (for example, that on that same day
the earth’s poles will reverse, putting New York, geomagnetically speaking,
where Tasmania is now). At the same time I wanted to take the Maya calendar
and Maya cosmology seriously enough to satisfy (even) Maya scholars and
archaeologists. I wanted to make the book a kind of doubled—and in a way
quadrupled —love story which, in a particular way, crosses thirteen hundred
years. I wanted to make it suspenseful enough to keep readers turning the
pages despite their daunting number. I wanted the discussion of strategy
games to be serious enough for, say, professional Go players, but still
comprehensible to that mythical creature, the General Reader. I wanted the
book to be the most serious fictional treatment, so far, of the Classic Maya
period. I wanted some poetry in the translated Maya speech. I wanted my
illustrations to be credibly Maya and to increase the book’s atmosphere of
mystery rather than diminishing it. And I wanted many, many other things.
Whether the book achieves these things is up to the readers—and, I suppose I
could say, the critics, although one of the good things about the online era
is that the readers and the critics are increasingly the same people. Also
as a result of the online era, feedback from readers has been plentiful so
far and often very illuminating. So—amazingly even to myself—the project
has been engrossing enough to keep me going through the last fifteen years,
and I’m it will continue to fuel me through the few years more that it will
take to finish. At any rate, comments or questions (as they say) can be
directed to bd@briandamato.com, and so far I’ve been pretty good about
answering them. Your move…