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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER!
Goodreads Choice Awards Semifinalist!
B&N Editor's Pick - Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2017
From bestselling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.
When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself. The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she must swear herself to secrecy in return for the rather large sum of money.
Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners. Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace--the world's fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by magic, and it's up to Tristan to find out why.
And so the Department of Diachronic Operations--D.O.D.O.--gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive . . . and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial--and treacherous--nature of the human heart.
Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephenson's work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland's storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to places--and times--beyond imagining.
Author Notes
Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, was born on October 31, 1959 in Maryland. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography with a minor in physics. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984. It received little attention and stayed out of print until Stephenson allowed it to be reprinted in 2001.
His second novel was Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was published in 1988, but it was his novel Snow Crash (1992) that brought him popularity. It fused memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology.
Neal Stephenson has won several awards: Hugo for Best Novel for The Diamond Age (1996), the Arthur C. Clarke for Best Novel for Quicksilver (2004), and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The System of the World (2005).
He recently completed the The Baroque Cycle Trilogy, a series of historical novels. It consists of eight books and was originally published in three volumes and Reamde. His latest novel is entitled The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O.
Stephenson also writes under the pseudonym Stephen Bury.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The engaging collaboration between bestseller Stephenson (Seveneves) and historical novelist Galland (Crossed) is presented as five volumes of collected materials, ranging from handwritten journals and letters to printouts of PowerPoint presentations and white papers. These materials chronicle the establishment of DODO, a black-budget operation created to restore magic to the present through the application of science. The Diachronicle, written by Melisande "Mel" Stokes in 1851 London, introduces her as a 21st-century linguist stranded unwillingly in the past, just before the Great Exhibition of 1851 effectively brings an end to magic. Stokes was recruited from her Boston University academic work by the charming Tristan Lyons to do lucrative work translating documents and reporting any common patterns for DODO. Quantum physics, witchcraft, and multiple groups with conflicting agendas, playfully mixed with vernacular from several centuries and a dizzying number of acronyms, create a fascinating experiment in speculation and metafiction that never loses sight of the human foibles and affections of its cast. Agency: Darhansoff & Verrill. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* What would you give to bring magic back into the world? According to Stephenson and Galland's enticing speculative thriller, Melisande Stokes paid a high price. Stranded in mid-nineteenth-century England, she records a chronicle of her involvement with the Department of Diachronic Operations (D.O.D.O.). Her account explains how military officer and trained physicist Tristan Lyons recruited her to work for D.O.D.O. in the twenty-first century. Melisande's skill with several ancient languages made her uniquely qualified to translate a collection of documents from a variety of time periods and locales. Working together, she and Tristan discover the impossible, that magic is real and was openly practiced until 1851. Further investigations lead them to Frank Oda, a former MIT physics professor who tried to patent an ODEC, a device that may allow for practicing magic. The powers at D.O.D.O. are determined to have magic back at any cost, but for the ODEC to work, they need a witch, if one still exists. Assuming they find a witch and restore her powers, how can they trust her? Combining Melisande's recollections with journal entries, mission logs, emails, transcripts from multiple characters, and epic Norse poetry, the authors spin a complex and engaging what-if tale that blends technology and history. Ready-made for fans of intricate speculative fiction.--Lockley, Lucy Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Team Time: If you co-write a book about magic, is that crowd-sorcery? The science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson (inset) and the historical novelist Nicole Galland have teamed up to produce a fat marshmallow of a fantasy novel, "The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O." - new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 11 - about a timetraveling intelligence officer and a Harvard linguist who discover that magic was once commonplace. On the back cover of early promotional copies, the authors explained their process. "Nicki made a first pass over the opening phase," Stephenson said, "while I ran tech support, tracking the timeline on a spreadsheet and spewing out gobs of technogibberish when that was needed." Galland added: "This collaboration was great fun, in part because I got to witness Neal spew out gobs of techno-gibberish, which he does very elegantly." The novel clocks in at almost 800 pages, a fact that spurred Maclean's Magazine recently to wonder whether long narratives are especially meaningful as an antidote to the instant gratifications of social media. "Oh, there are so many good things about reading a book," Stephenson replied. "The practice of sustained attention is something that's happening less and less, especially in our leisure time, so a long narrative, and one that's this intricate, which requires that you're always plugged in, because there are various things going on at once - I think that that's a great exercise. I would assign this book as a brain exercise, as well as a jolly good read, but also I think there's something so fantastically tactile about the physical act of holding the book and turning the pages, and feeling the texture of the binding, and the little movements that happen when you have to balance a book on your lap. There's a stillness that comes from just reading off a screen that I don't think is healthy." Her Body, Her Self: "Some girls," the philosopher Steven Morrissey once posited, "are bigger than others." That's the basic premise behind Roxane Gay's new book, "Hunger," a textured memoir about trauma, shame and body image that makes its debut at No. 8 on the hardcover nonfiction list. In it, Gay discusses the sexual assault she survived as a girl and explains her decision to bulk up afterward as a form of physical and emotional defense. "I told myself that no one was going to read it," Gay told Rolling Stone recently. "That's how I get through all of the writing that I do that's personal in nature. If I think too much about it, I absolutely will chicken out." ? 'Oh, there are so many good things about reading a book.'
School Library Journal Review
Dr. Melisande Stokes pens a diary in which she chronicles the events that brought her to 1851 London, where she has been marooned against her will. She writes it so that someone in the future (2017) will discover it and learn how D.O.D.O., a secret government organization, unlocked the secret of time travel. Her tale begins in the halls of Harvard, where she meets government official Tristan Lyons, who lures her from her job as professor of ancient languages so she can read the ancient texts needed to understand where and how magic worked in the past. His plan: to travel back in time to connect with those who practiced magic. How to do that is up to physicist Frank Oda, who is tasked with designing the method of transportation. It is only when Melisande meets Erzabet Karpathy, a witch from the past with knowledge of their aims, that she understands the real mission: to bring magic back and put it to work today. Melisande's diary carries the story, but Viking sagas, email conversations, government memos, and 16th-century handwritten letters are interspersed throughout. There are others who want this information. Can D.O.D.O. defeat them? VERDICT Fans of science fiction, science, history, romance, and shady government operations will love this rich narrative about a world in which time travel and magic seem possible.-Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Immense and immensely entertaining genre-hopping yarn from hard-core sci-fi veteran Stephenson (Seveneves, 2015, etc.) and historical novelist Galland (Stepdog, 2015, etc.)."You have an agreeably uninteresting existence," says the shadowy government recruiter. "Let's see if we can change that." Our heroine, a brilliant specialist in ancient languages, cannot refuse, especially since the pay packet Tristan Lyons is offering is many times more than her adjunct position pays. With that, they're offbut where? Blend time travel with Bourne-worthy skulduggery, throw in lashings of technology and dashes of steampunk, and you have the makings of this overstuffed, disbelief-begging storyline. That storyline begins and ends with language, but in between there's a fair amount of outright mad science, courtesy of the inventor of the Ontic Decoherence Cavity ("An MIT physics professor who tried to patent groundbreaking technological innovations is a Luddite?"), andwell, of witchcraft, which seems an uneasy fit at first but soon comes to make as much sense as anything else in this head-spinning tale. And what is D.O.D.O., the place where the ODEC is put into play courtesy of DARPA? Melisande Stokes, said linguist, gamely guesses that it means "Department of Diabolical Obscurantism," but no, it's much more than all that. Stephenson and Galland turn ethnic clichs on their heads, introducing Magyar sorceresses and hipper-than-thou Asian baristas into the mix as their yarn careens into Dan Brown land: we know we're there when we hit on Athanasius Fugger and his penumbral lineage, "completely absent from the historical record," characters worthy of Umberto Eco and perfectly at home here. Suffice it to say that the story gets weirder and more madcap from there. A departure for both authors and a pleasing combination of much appeal to fans of speculative fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Sf author Stephenson (Seveneves) joins forces with historical novelist Galland (I, Iago) in this exuberant time-hopping adventure. Military intelligence expert Tristan Lyons possesses ancient documents that prove magic, now extinct, was commonplace until the mid-19th century, bringing translator Melisande Stokes in to help with the project. The duo are joined by a Hungarian witch, an eccentric physicist and his wife, a jargon-spouting bureaucrat, and a rollicking group of historical figures, all navigating the strands of time. VERDICT The combination of technology, history, and humor will have readers racing through the pages as quickly as the D.O.D.O. (Department of Diachronic Operations) team hops through time. Quantum physics has never been this fun-or this funny. (LJ 5/15/17) © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.