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Summary: A mind-bending, time-bending, zeitgeist-defining novel about the days leading up to December 21, 2012—the day the Maya predicted the world would end December 21, 2012. The day time stops. Jed DeLanda, a descendant of the Maya living in the year 2012, is a math prodigy who spends his time playing Go against his computer and raking in profits from online trading. (His secret weapon? A Mayan divination game—once used for predicting corn-harvest cycles, now proving very useful in predicting corn futures—that his mother taught him.) But Jed’s life is thrown into chaos when his former mentor, the game theorist Taro, and a mysterious woman named Marena Park, invite him to give his opinion on a newly discovered Mayan codex. Marena and Taro are looking for a volunteer to travel back to 664 AD to learn more about a “sacrifice game” described in the codex. Jed leaps at the chance, and soon scientists are replicating his brain waves and sending them through a wormhole, straight into the mind of a Mayan king& Only something goes wrong. Instead of becoming a king, Jed arrives inside a ballplayer named Chacal who is seconds away from throwing himself down the temple steps as a human sacrifice. If Jed can live through the next few minutes, he might just save the world. Bringing to mind Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon and Gary Jennings’s Aztec , yet entirely unique, In the Courts of the Sun takes you from the distant past to the near future in a brilliant kaleidoscope of ideas.