Remember back in February, when we broached the possibility that Dan Brown still hasn't turned in his sequel to The Da Vinci Code because he might be starting the whole thing over to cash in on the hoopla over the Mayan calendar running out of time in 2012? If that was his plan—and we stress that we have no clue whatsoever—he's already too late: Brian D'Amato has already published In the Courts of the Sun.

D'Amato sees the audience for his novel, the first in a projected trilogy, as being a little bit brighter than Brown's core demographic, "or at least they'll remember their history classes better." (An artist and art historian, he couldn't get into DVC after spotting major errors just in the first few pages.) "I'd like to get a little more thriller and literary thriller readers," he elaborated, and added Neal Stephenson and Michael Crichton as potential reference points—he spoke admiringly of Crichton's The Great Train Robbery: "It was like seeing Victorian England through the eyes of a science fiction writer, picking out all the odd, alien details."

D'Amato's interest in the Mayan prophecy (about which he remains agnostic) goes back to a computer art installation called the Sacrifice Game he worked on in the early 1990s. "There were some ideas I was trying to get out in the Game (and in paintings) that were too literary, too wordy," he says of his decision to transition back to novel writing (after 1992's Beauty). Still, he would like to incorporate more visual elements, especially at an interactive level: "Even a graphic novel is limited in terms of how much information you can put into it," he explained to us; his overall effort is to try to figure out how the ancient Mayans thought, especially from a visual perspective. "Of course, you're never really going to know," he admitted. "Even if you grew up there now, in Mayan culture, what you'd know would be different from the way they thought back then."

What we wanted to know is: Would D'Amato have the trilogy done in time for December 21, 2012? He laughed; the next book is due in early 2010, and he's still working on it. "I'm toying with the idea of putting everything into that book and then making the third my Silmarillion," he joked, referring to J.R.R. Tolkien's compendium of Lord of the Ring-related backstory. "And I've got to get a multi-user game off the ground in the next year or so as well."

D'Amato also spoke to us about the original artwork he created to illustrate In the Courts of the Sun, and the origins of his interest in Mayan art and culture: