Tne Stargate Codex

In the red dust of Rajasthan, something has been waiting since before the Ice Age. March, 1953. Archaeologist and war veteran Karl Sterling and his friend, the linguist Akshay Chauhan, dig to the bottom of a forgotten stepwell and find a disc of quartz that should not exist. Lines are engraved inside the crystal itself, and when Karl holds it, it throws a map of the stars across the ceiling. The map shows seven burning points on the ancient Earth: Göbekli Tepe, Giza, a drowned city off the coast of India, Teotihuacan, the frozen north, Bundi itself, and a high old plateau in the heart of America called the Ozarks. Then a dead radio speaks in German. Stones fall from a clear sky. And a saucer of violet light comes down over the village in the night. Dr. Heinrich von Lichtmann, a fugitive scholar of Himmler's Ahnenerbe, has hunted these crystal keys since 1938. He believes they were left by the Shining Ones, star-gods who chose a master race to rule the Earth. He means to set all seven keys into a gate on the Moon and open the door to the power beyond. There is only one problem. The keys will not light for him. They light for Karl. From the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Bombay to a sunken city of non-human architecture beneath the Gulf of Cambay, from a crystal cathedral under the bluffs of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to a homemade rocket ship fueled with Ozark moonshine, Karl and his companions race to stop him: Dr. Meera Sharma, a fierce government archaeologist; Ambrose Quill, an aging disciple of Charles Fort who has spent twenty-two years collecting the "data of the damned"; Del Rakestraw, a silver-eyed ham radio operator and crystal digger; and Wendell Harrow, a cantankerous rocketeer who once built engines for Robert Goddard. Their road leads to the glowing crater of Aristarchus and the sleeping Selenites of a hollow Moon. It leads to the dying canal cities of Mars, to the singers in the last glass city and the warrior clans of the deep desert. It leads to the living ocean beneath the ice of Europa and the thinking crystal forests on the methane shore of Titan, and finally to an abandoned Dyson swarm around a dimming star fourteen hundred light-years from home. There, at the edge of everything, a hunger with no shape is pressing against the Great Door. The ancient builders left humanity a warning, carved in stone at the bottom of a well: Open only what you can close. The Stargate Codex is a love letter to the Golden Age of science fiction, to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury, to the lunar adventures of the 1950s and the cosmic dread of H.P. Lovecraft, to the restless curiosity of Charles Fort and the ancient-astronaut mysteries of Erich von Däniken. It is a pulp adventure of rocket ships and flying saucers, lost civilizations and alien worlds. At its heart is one stubborn question: are we property, or are we something far stranger and more wonderful? The stars are calling. It's time to answer.