One time I mentioned on the site that I wondered what a combination of science fiction and fantasy would be like.\u00a0 TomD, whose opinions on matters political, photographic and literary are always enlightening, immediately volunteered two examples, The Majipoor Cycle and the Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.\u00a0 I have previously reviewed the Majipoor books.\u00a0 Here I will address D.O.D.O. and just to get it out of the way the acronym stands for Department of Diachronic Operatives, a government issue time travel story.<\/p>\n
Neal Stephenson wrote this book with Nicole Galland.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard of Stephenson but never read him before.\u00a0 I\u2019d never heard of Galland before this book.\u00a0 So, the book finally got to the top of the pile and I just finished it on Thursday past.\u00a0 The first thing I can say is that this is a hybrid creation.\u00a0 The outline of the story is a time-travel science fiction story of the giant government project category.\u00a0 On that framework is a story that combines historical fiction, fantasy and a satiric contemporary novel about day to day life in a government bureaucracy.\u00a0 The other fact about the story is that most of it is a first-person narrative by a modern female character.\u00a0 And this particular character is a college teaching assistant with expertise in linguistics.\u00a0 And I am intimately familiar with this subspecies.\u00a0 And I\u2019m not greatly sympathetic to its idiosyncrasies.\u00a0 Also, the story takes place in Cambridge, MA.\u00a0 And I am also intimately familiar with the habits and foibles of the people who live there.\u00a0 And I am also not greatly sympathetic to their idiosyncrasies either.\u00a0 So, this starts me out in the wrong place as a reader and reviewer.<\/p>\n
Moving on from there, the story ingeniously constructs a scenario where the present-day American military becomes worried about losing a global arms race in magic.\u00a0 Military intelligence has somehow detected anomalies in the present that lead them to believe that someone has figured out how to travel back in time.\u00a0 And based on a thorough computerized analysis of historical documents, they believe the method involves witchcraft.\u00a0 And since witchcraft doesn\u2019t seem to exist anymore, they need to figure out how to revive it.\u00a0 And reviving it hinges on manipulating quantum states of matter and invokes Schrodinger\u2019s Cat who literally shows up in the story (the cat, not the Schrodinger).<\/p>\n
From there we meet a Japanese scientist\/Mayflower descendant, husband\/wife team, which is a category that believe it or not, I\u2019m also personally familiar with.\u00a0 He\u2019s a quantum physicist who has been investigating the mechanism that the story needs to restore magic and she is the descendant of a burned Salem witch.\u00a0 Mix in a surviving one hundred and eighty-year-old Hungarian witch, a dashing young army lieutenant colonel, a plucky and annoying female linguist (these last two being the love interests in the story) and assorted scientists, generals, computer geeks and bureaucrats both academic and military and you have the cast that becomes project D.O.D.O.\u00a0 Once they succeed, we add into the stew, witches from colonial Massachusetts, Elizabethan London, thirteenth century Constantinople and various times and places in medieval northern Europe.\u00a0 And the non-witch historical characters include Byzantine emperors and empresses, Varangian guards, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage and a raiding party of Vikings in a Walmart.<\/p>\n
The text is a collection of Victorian era journal entries, Elizabethan era letters, some medieval vellum codices, U.S. military documents and a copious collection of e-mail messages from a variety of bureaucratic organizations.\u00a0 The story is in several voices modern and antique but as mentioned above is primarily the journal of the young woman linguist who is the protagonist and the focal point of several of the original plot elements.<\/p>\n
Despite my obvious lack of sympathy for the protagonist and several other of the main characters, the story works on its own terms.\u00a0 The characters are self-consistent and wherever I am competent to compare them to their real-life exemplars highly accurate. \u00a0Because of the details of the time travel mechanism, the action is of necessity episodic and sometimes repetitive.\u00a0 This situation is written pretty well and only results in a little slowness in the action at the beginning of the book.\u00a0 Toward the end the pacing picks up quite a bit and the book ends by resolving the latest crisis but the finish requires that there will be sequels.<\/p>\n
My opinion on the book is that if you are like me and rather dislike bureaucrats and modern women then you will have limited sympathy for the protagonist and several of the main characters.\u00a0 There is a good amount of swashbuckling action by the military officer who is a main character and likable.\u00a0 The story line is extremely clever as a science fiction plot.\u00a0 So, I recommend it as a story with the proviso that men of my generation will be tempted occasionally to toss the book at the wall when modern New England feminist empowerment rears its ugly head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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