Where Some People Do Some Stuff in a Place

Decipher by Stel Pavlou
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was okay.

There are a thousand ideas in this book, from ancient civilizations to gravity wave science, from corporate greed to international diplomacy, from golems to ghosts, but they don't hold together all that well. Even though I happily read lots of fantasy and science fiction and pulp, I found the suspension of disbelief while reading this increasingly hard to maintain. Bunches of it--the parts under the pyramids in Giza and under the ice in Antarctica especially--seem a lot like the monumental ancient history stuff out of H.P. Lovecraft stories, and it just never really seems to work.

It's reasonably fun to read. It breezes along pretty well, not hard to digest, though there's just way too many scenes with people sitting around and talking about stuff they know about ancient civilizations and weird things in science, piecing together what's happening all over the world like Robert Langdon figuring out the Da Vinci code. It's meant to be useful exposition, but it's mostly nonsensical. They translate 12,000 year old writing by assuming it's Sumerian, and it works. That's kinda silly. In the end, I found it impossible to care very much about anyone in the story. I learned literally zero of the names involved. I just read what they said and did and didn't worry who was saying it, because it didn't really matter.

This sounds like a 2-star review, and that's slightly unfair. I gave it 3, because it had enough movement and "what's gonna happen?" interest for me to finish it. It was okay. It aimed for big ideas like Jurassic Park and fell short, IMO, but some readers will enjoy it.

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