Buckle in, listeners, for a wild ride! The Department of Diachronic Operations, a secret government agency, seeks to revive magic for 21st-century use. A crack team of core operatives, composed of polyglot Melisande “Mel” Stokes, military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons, physicist Frank Oda, and a cantankerous witch named Erzebet, develops a system of time travel. Multiple narrators weave memorable character performances with increasingly tangled “strands” of events, along with an assortment of letters, memos, meetings, chat transcripts, and other communications media. Their distinct accents and intuitive pacing summon a magical blend of personalities and narrative. It’s a highly complex, amusing, and engrossing world. Eventually, the team’s best-laid plans go askew when rogue operatives, military officials, and bureaucrats complicate matters considerably. J.R.T. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

06/01/2017
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)

Buckle in, listeners, for a wild ride! The Department of Diachronic Operations, a secret government agency, seeks to revive magic for 21st-century use. A crack team of core operatives, composed of polyglot Melisande “Mel” Stokes, military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons, physicist Frank Oda, and a cantankerous witch named Erzebet, develops a system of time travel. Multiple narrators weave memorable character performances with increasingly tangled “strands” of events, along with an assortment of letters, memos, meetings, chat transcripts, and other communications media. Their distinct accents and intuitive pacing summon a magical blend of personalities and narrative. It’s a highly complex, amusing, and engrossing world. Eventually, the team’s best-laid plans go askew when rogue operatives, military officials, and bureaucrats complicate matters considerably. J.R.T. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

★ 2017-04-17
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 off—but 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?"), and—well, 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 clichés 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.