Tuesday, April 10, 2007
book report: Decipher
Decipher
by Stel Pavlou
I borrowed this book from my dad when I realized that I was about to depart on a family vacation without a book to read. My dad volunteered that he had a novel he hadn't started yet, and I traded it for The Forge of God so he would have something to read, too.
This should have been a decent sci-fi book but it wasn't. The author is apparently a screenwriter, so the story came across very visually, which was cool. But the meta-dialog ("She revealed" "He shouted loudly" etc) was pretty stilted and crappy. I tried to skim the dialog and stick to the action, which worked out okay.
So, the story. It's about the impending doom of planet Earth which is about to be bombarded by a storm of solar flares, the likes of which has not been seen in 12,000 years. There's some interesting stuff about how many world religions point to the current time (the novel is set in, um, 2012? something like that) being the end of days. You've got your Armageddon, your Kali-yug, your end of times on the Mayan calendar, and so on. I did enjoy that aspect of the book. The sort of silly, action-flick part was about the discovery! of! Atlantis! which for some reason was stashed at the South Pole under a mile of ice. Oh, and it's made out of diamond-like carbon material. And is inhabited by sentient nanobots. Or golems. Or something.
It was an okay vacation read, and it did pique my interest in reading up on world religions, especially the genesis of pre-Christian stories that got absorbed into Christianity (did the Sumerians really have a Great Flood story, minus Noah and his meathead sons?). I just wish I could've imagined someone other than Jeff Goldblum as the nerdy guy.
by Stel Pavlou
I borrowed this book from my dad when I realized that I was about to depart on a family vacation without a book to read. My dad volunteered that he had a novel he hadn't started yet, and I traded it for The Forge of God so he would have something to read, too.
This should have been a decent sci-fi book but it wasn't. The author is apparently a screenwriter, so the story came across very visually, which was cool. But the meta-dialog ("She revealed" "He shouted loudly" etc) was pretty stilted and crappy. I tried to skim the dialog and stick to the action, which worked out okay.
So, the story. It's about the impending doom of planet Earth which is about to be bombarded by a storm of solar flares, the likes of which has not been seen in 12,000 years. There's some interesting stuff about how many world religions point to the current time (the novel is set in, um, 2012? something like that) being the end of days. You've got your Armageddon, your Kali-yug, your end of times on the Mayan calendar, and so on. I did enjoy that aspect of the book. The sort of silly, action-flick part was about the discovery! of! Atlantis! which for some reason was stashed at the South Pole under a mile of ice. Oh, and it's made out of diamond-like carbon material. And is inhabited by sentient nanobots. Or golems. Or something.
It was an okay vacation read, and it did pique my interest in reading up on world religions, especially the genesis of pre-Christian stories that got absorbed into Christianity (did the Sumerians really have a Great Flood story, minus Noah and his meathead sons?). I just wish I could've imagined someone other than Jeff Goldblum as the nerdy guy.
Labels: book reports
