Decipher [Hardcover]

Stel Pavlou (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2002

MANKIND HAS HAD 12,000 YEARS TO DECIPHER THE MESSAGE,
WE HAVE ONE WEEK LEFT....

There is a signal emanating from deep within the ice of Antarctica. Atlantis has awoken. Ancient monuments all over the worlds from the Pyramids of Giza, to Mexico to the ancient sites of China are reacting...to a brewing crisis not of this earth, but somewhere out in the solar system. Connecting to each other through the oceans. Using low frequency sound waves to create an ancient network. The earth is thrown into panic stations. For it seems that the signals emanating from Atlantis are a prelude to something much greater. Could it be that the entire city is in fact one giant ancient machine? And to what end? For what purpose?

It is the year 2012, the same year Mayan belief prophesised the end of the world. Two armies, American and Chinese stand on the brink of war for the control of the most potent force ever known to man. The secrets of Atlantis. Secrets which are encoded in crystal shards retrieved from the sunken city. Secrets which Mankind has had twelve thousand years to decipher...but which will now destroy it within one week.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In British screenwriter Pavlou's adolescent first novel, it's March 2012 and huge storms are raging around the globe, sparked by giant sunspots. The villainous U.S. Rola Corporation, drilling for desperately needed oil off Antarctica, discovers strange crystalline artifacts covered with a precuneiform script, while radiation detected under the antarctic ice portends the awakening of powerful alien forces. An unconvincing gaggle of scientists discovers they have only one unholy Holy Week to ship a nuclear device to Antarctica and bomb the underwater threat to smithereens. Pavlou builds his unlikely crescendo of Bad Things from nearly every major folklore, myth and religion, dizzyingly cutting between eye-popping disasters and eye-glazing capsule summaries of linguistics, geology, chemistry, mathematics, numerology, cryptology, archeology, ESP and Edgar Cayce. Stripped down to comic book proportions for the big screen, with a deafening soundtrack and a teenage audience anesthetized to a vocabulary largely dominated by four-letter cliches, this often gruesome tale might make a middling SF adventure flick. The often ludicrous dialogue and the ham-fisted handling of human relations and motivations, however, make for an unfocused novel, one patched together like Frankenstein, with every stitching line, every unnatural feature, unblushingly exposed to the most casual glance.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In a frozen wasteland near the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a world-weary team of oil drillers jubilantly believes that it has located a major strike. Instead of black gold, however, the men discover a bizarre cluster of rocks with unnatural markings similar to ancient hieroglyphs. Shortly afterward, these enigmatic rocks begin to appear in seemingly unrelated sites across the globe, including the Amazon River and an underground chamber beneath the Sphinx. A crackerjack squad of the world's premier geocryptologists soon determines that the stones are actually composed of carbon 60, a superior energy source previously unknown to modern science. From this point, the plot machinations are revved into overdrive with all the subtlety of an avalanche. Solar flares, Atlantis, ancient Mayan prophecies, the Book of Revelations, and unexplained worldwide cataclysms are tossed into the mix, creating enough fringe ideas to make an Art Bell radio show listener drool. Ludicrous theories about the origins of carbon 60 are proposed, and the narrative is continually peppered with textbook passages that attempt to ground the science in reality. Pavlou does not exactly strike gold with this initial effort, but regardless of its faults, Decipher remains a semiprecious page-turner. For larger fiction collections.
Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (September 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312280750
• ISBN-13: 978-0312280758
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (120 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #909,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stel Pavlou makes stuff up for a living. So far he's made up two novels, Decipher and Gene, a movie, The 51st State, some short stories and a collection of other noodlings. He hopes to make a few more things up before anyone catches on and stops him.

Stel is of mixed Anglo-Greek descent, so only fifty percent of his gift giving should be treated with any suspicion.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Over the top and I loved it!, April 8, 2005

By 

R. Knowles (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Decipher (Mass Market Paperback)

Art Bell meets Indiana Jones = a blast. I think this is one of those books you'll either get it or you won't. Tons of science and mythology, Reilly action, Cussler adventure, all crammed into a Dan Brown puzzle plot.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very entertaining read, March 30, 2005

By 

C. Bierdrager - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Decipher (Hardcover)

Well-researched and chock full of interesting information - I really enjoyed this book. The characters were very real; Stel really did a good job, in my opinion, with the human element. It was thoroughly interesting and entertaining, my two primary criteria for fiction. Actually, I would give it a 4.5 (not 4).

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable pretentious "hard junk science"-fiction, September 10, 2002

By 

Stephane Desnault - See all my reviews

This review is from: Decipher (Hardcover)

The premise of the book seemed interesting enough to get me to part with my hard earned cash... What a waste! I couldn't go past the first 100 pages of this mammoth book of pretentious ignorant pseudo scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The "science" and "age old myths" suposedly "researched" by the author make a "Buffy and the Vampires" tv episode look brilliant and documented. The "chaos scientist" is in the same league as the character played by Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day and Jurassic Park, only even more "new age" and improbable.

Scientific and historical errors I could notice are so numerous in the few pages I read that I won't even try to list them. I do agree with other reviewers that this book would make a fine Bruce Willis film : just like "Armaggedon" where there was wind and gravity on the incoming asteroid!!!...