Stel Pavlou: Decipher

By GILBERT WONG

Stel Pavlou has obviously wasted many hours watching bad, big-budget Hollywood disaster movies. If the title hadn't already been taken it could have been Apocalypse Now as Pavlou merges biblical prophecy, particle physics and the legendary lost city of Atlantis into a mishmash tale about how the world ends. Predictably it comes with a big bang rather than a whimper.

Protagonist Richard Scott is an anthropologist who can read cuneiform, an early form of writing. Texts newly discovered under the sea, and pre-dating the biblical flood, predict even worse to come.

Scott joins a UN team sent to figure out what's going on. In the best tradition of technothrillers, world powers are facing each other off, the environment is heading down the toilet and in Switzerland physicists are talking gibberish about gravity waves destabilising the sun. Everything happens at breathtaking pace, partly because Palou steps up the tension by giving his characters a week to save the world.

I am sure that Pavlou has done his research. Like Michael Crichton, the master of this genre, he includes a lengthy bibliography referring to everyone from A.N. Wilson to Colin Wilson. But unlike Crichton, whose background in science gives him the ability to give the fantastic the veneer of credibility, Pavlou only leaves the reader stunned at his cheek. One for that rainy day at the bach, folks.

Simon & Schuster

$29.95