How Chichen Itza Inspired a Sci-Fi Novel

Traveling has always been an inspiration to me. A chance to get away, to explore, to experience a new culture—it’s fuel for my creativity.

In the summer of 2014, I visited the Mayan city of Chichen Itza in Mexico. That trip planted the seed for The Auriga Project and—without knowing it at the time—the entire Translocator series.

The Mayan Riviera

I reached Chichen Itza the same way most of the 1.4 million tourists each year do—by way of a Mexican beach resort vacation.

I was working for a company that flew us down there for a work retreat. We landed in Cancun, and spent the first few days reading on the beach or drinking at the swim-up bar. What? I’m a writer, not an animal. We had a blast.

However, toward the end of the week we did something I’ll never forget.

On our last full day, we boarded a bus and drove inland to Chichen Itza.

A swim in the cenote

My biggest regret on any resort vacation is the inevitable isolation from the real culture of the country I’m visiting. Resorts are removed from the cultural centers, and the locals avoid them.

So despite my hangover and the prospect of four hours of bumpy bus time, I was alert and excited for the drive. I didn’t know what the adventure held in store, but I had the sense that this was my chance to find that creative fuel I was always looking for.

Our first stop was at an underground cenote—a sinkhole filled with rainwater—where we stopped for a little swim.

Archaeologists believe two things about these natural formations: that the Maya used them as a primary water source, and that held a deeply spiritual significance for the ancient people.

The swimming cenote

To get inside, I descended a curved set of stone steps, maybe fifty of them. It was huge—cavernous in a way that feels enormous—and very cold inside. At the bottom of the steps, I knelt at the water’s edge. It was chilly and very deep.

I kicked off my shoes and jumped in feet first. I’d been right—my toes never touched the bottom. I swam laps around the bright spot at the back of the cave while dust motes danced in a single ray of light coming through the hole above, at ground level.

There was artificial lighting strung across the cave, but at that time of day it wasn’t needed. It was quiet except for the sound of my coworkers splashing and laughing.

It wasn’t a religious experience for me—but it was the coolest I’d been outdoors all week, and for the first time I understood why the Maya treasured the cenotes.

Hearing the Yucatec Maya language

Our next stop was Chichen Itza, but the tour company had a surprise waiting for us on the way in.

The bus stopped by a small village to pick up a local man. I don’t remember his name, only that he had two—a Spanish name and a Mayan name, one for each culture he lived in.

He was selling parchment paper with your birthday written out using the Maya calendar. I definitely admired his entrepreneurial spirit. He walked up and down the aisle taking orders; we’d pick them up on the return trip. I may have bought one. I don’t remember.

What I remember most, though, wasn’t the paper he sold. It was the words he spoke. I’ve always been fascinated with languages, and hearing this man and the bus driver slip into Maya together absorbed my whole attention.

I asked the man to speak more, and he did. I got to hear all the glottal stops and soft shushing sounds that are completely missing from the languages I know.

Yucatec Maya is a beautiful language. In the weeks after the trip I kept returning to that moment—to how the language and much of the Maya culture continues to live in the Mexican lowlands even though the jungle and modern archaeology has long since reclaimed the cities.

Because culture doesn’t live in buildings, does it? Culture lives in people.

(If you want to hear it yourself, here are a couple of YouTube videos: Maya Making Hammocks, field work; spoken Yucatec Maya and What Yucatec Maya Really Sounds Like.)

Chichen Itza or “The mouth of the well of the water sorcerers”

After we dropped the entrepreneur off, we drove on to Chichen Itza. By the time we arrived, the sun was high overhead. We grabbed lunch and water and headed into the ruins with a tour guide, keeping close to what shade we could find and rubbing sunscreen into our sweaty skin.

The Temple of Kukulkan in Chichen Itza

Chichen Itza is one of the largest Maya cities ever built. The great stepped pyramid at its center—the Temple of Kukulkan, or El Castillo—was restored by archaeologists in the 1920s and ‘30s, and it’s impressive.

The Great Ball Court and the Temple of the Warriors stand within a couple hundred yards of El Castillo. The jungle has been pruned back just enough to expose the structures, but you can feel it waiting at the edges, ready to move in at the first opportunity.

Carvings in The Great Ball Court at Chichen Itza

First we walked through the Great Ball Court. The guide explained how, if you stand at one end, you can hear someone speak in a normal voice from the opposite end of the field. He clapped once, and a sharp crack reverberated along the full length of the court. On the walls, carvings depicted the captain of one team holding the severed head of the losing captain as his trophy, a sacrifice to the gods. Whether the losers were actually executed is still debated—but it was certainly the story they chose to immortalize in stone.

Standing at the base of the Temple of Kukulkan, our guide pointed out the section of stairway where the body of the feathered serpent appears as a shadow during the Spring Equinox. That solar alignment still draws crowds from all over the world every year.

The name Chichen Itza (Chee-CHEN Eets-HA) translates roughly as “the mouth of the well of the water sorcerers.” The Itza were the ethnic group who ruled this part of the ancient Maya world, and the well refers to the Sacred Cenote—located down a straight ceremonial road through the trees that today is lined with vendors pushing carved trinkets at tourists.

The Sacred Cenote is open-air, and you’re not allowed to swim in this one. The water is a rich cerulean color. Why? Excavations in the mid-20th century found indigo dye, jade artifacts and human bones at the bottom—which is why it’s also known as the Well of Sacrifices.

What archaeologists have discovered since

The mystery of this place has only deepened in the years since I visited.

In 2015, researchers conducting an electrical resistance survey discovered that the Temple of Kukulkan sits directly on top of an underground cenote. The pyramid is, quite literally, built over water—and geologists warn that the cenote will eventually undermine the structure above it. The temple is slowly being consumed from below.

Then, in January 2018, came an even more staggering discovery. Divers in the Yucatán confirmed that two massive cave systems—the Sac Actun System and Dos Ojos—are actually a single continuous underwater network stretching more than 216 miles (347 km). It’s the largest flooded cave system ever found.

Even just the names fire my imagination.

The caves contained over a hundred “archaeological contexts,” including evidence of some of the first human settlers in the Americas, extinct megafauna, and extensive caches of Maya artifacts.

Guillermo de Anda, one of the lead researchers, called it “the most important submerged archaeological site in the world.”

Here’s footage from the expedition that’s worth a few minutes of your time:

The forest at the edges of Chichen Itza would surely swallow the ruins again if we let it. How many other cities have already been consumed—cities we don’t even know about? These discoveries suggest the answer is a lot more than we think.

What else is hidden below the surface?

How it all made its way into fiction

We eventually boarded the bus and drove back to the resort. The heat had hollowed me out, and I’d managed to get lost in the ruins for a while—it’s bigger than it looks. The tiny monitors that folded out of the ceiling of the bus played a documentary about the ancient Maya while we napped.

Two months later, I found myself writing a story about a woman who wakes up on a strange beach washed with purple water.

It was supposed to be a science fiction story about a character who gets accidentally transported to an alien planet. Imagine my surprise when she found people living a pastoral life very similar to what we know of the ancient Maya—near a city of stone buildings reminiscent of Chichen Itza.

That story became my first novel, The Auriga Project. The story isn’t about the ancient Maya, and the location isn’t exactly like Chichen Itza (remember, it’s sci-fi!). But it was absolutely inspired by those ruins, by that man speaking to the bus driver in a language that has survived the fall of its civilization, and by the underground cenote where I swam in the dark while dust motes drifted through a ray of light from above.

I’ve always been inspired by travel. This was the first time a trip turned into a novel for me. But it wasn’t the last!

Read the books

The Auriga Project is where it all began—a harrowing tale of survival against all odds, and the gateway to an ancient alien mystery. If you’ve ever stood somewhere and felt the weight of everything that happened there long before you arrived, this is the book for that feeling.If you want to go deeper, the Translocator Ebook Bundle collects the complete trilogy—The Auriga Project, The Alien Element, and The Ares Initiative—along with bonus short fiction set in the same world.