There's a lot packed into David Moles' dense, brilliant alternative history novella Seven Cities of Gold: Mayan mythology, New World American folklore, a re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (and Coppola's Apocalypse Now), a meditation on the disasters of the last decade—Iraq and Katrina—as well as the numerous geopolitical upheavals of many decades before. There's also a complete re-imagining of religion as it is currently perceived by Western audiences: here Islam and Buddhism are the religions of the power elite while Christianity occupies a literal and figurative backwater.
