The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O
Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, 2017
HarperCollins
768 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062409164
Summary
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 sign a nondisclosure agreement 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bios
Neal Stephenson
• Birth—October 31, 1959
• Raised—Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Ames, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Awards—2 Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer and game designer known for his works of science fiction, historical fiction, cyber- and postcyber-punk.
Stephenson's work explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He is currently Magic Leap's Chief Futurist.
Background
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father was a professor of electrical engineering while his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor.
Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa, in 1966 where he graduated from high school in 1977.
He went on to stydy at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.
In 1984, Stephenson published his first novel, The Big U — a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots. His breakthrough novel came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a comic novel in the late cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk tradition. It was was the first of Stephenson's epic science fiction novels.
Successive novels deal with futurism, technology, World War II cryptology, metaphysics, ancient Greek philosophy, and international crime/terrorism (a thriller). He has also writen historical fiction, the Baroque Cycle — a series of eight books set in the 17th and 18th centuries, one of which won the 2005 Prometheus Award.
In May 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project called The Mongoliad, which centered around a narrative written by Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors, including Nicole Galland (see below).
In 2012, Stephenson launched a Kickstarter campaign for CLANG, a realistic sword fighting fantasy game. The concept of the game was to use motion control to provide an immersive experience. The campaign's funding goal of $500,000 was reached by the target date of July 9, 2012 on Kickstarter, but the project ran out of money and finally closed down in 2014.
Seveneves, a science fiction novel, came out in 2015, and plans have been announced to adapt it for the screen. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017 .)
Nicole Galland
• Birth—ca. 1965
• Raised—West Tisbury (Martha's Vineyard), Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
Nicole Galland is an American novelist, first known for her historical fiction. Then, in 2017 she switched genres to publish a near-future thriller, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., with Neal Stephenson. She has also published a contemporary comic novel, Stepdog, and using the pseudonym E.D. de Birmingham, she wrote Book Five of the Mongoloid Cycle. Mongoloid, a historical-epic-fantasy, is a collaborative effort of several speculative writers, including Neal Stephenson (see above.)
Background
Galland was born in New York, but grew up in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a farming community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her maternal family has roots going back to the 18th century. Her mother works as a nurse and her stepfather, a Viet Nam vet, was a Physician’s Assistant at Martha’s Vineyard only hospital.
She studied theater and earned a degree at Harvard in Comparative Religion with a focus in Buddhism. Although she received a full fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of California at Berkeley, she withdrew following a violent and bizarre assault at gunpoint. Traumatized by the encounter, she would eventually use it as fodder in her writing.
Moving back and forth between east and west coasts, and a stint on the Mediterranean, Galland spent her 20s and 30s working in theater, teaching, editing and juggling various odd jobs. This included co-founding a teen theater company in California that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. She once described her eclectic life as existing at the whim of serendipity.
Her screenplay, The Winter Population, won an award in 1998 but has yet to be produced. When her first novel, The Fool’s Tale, was published in 2005, she left her position as Literary Manager/Dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre to write full-time. While at Berkeley Rep she had written Revenge of the Rose, her second novel, and her third, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, was written over a 2-year period during which she essentially lived out of a backpack.
Having resided in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City for years, Galland returned to Martha's Vineyard to live full-time. She is married to actor Billy Meleady.
In addition to her novels, Galland has written for Salon.com and several Vineyard-based publications, including the Vineyard Gazette, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Edible Vineyard, of which she is a contributing editor
Galland has been involved in Vineyard theater, working at the Vineyard Playhouse and with ArtFarm Enterprises. She is co-founder, with Chelsea McCarthy, of Shakespeare for the Masses, an off-season series presenting irreverent adaptations Shakespeare’s plays on the Vineyard. And finally, a point of trivia, she appears in the CD-ROM Star Wars: Rebel Assault II as Ina Rece. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017.)
Book Reviews
[T]hough it’s no comic classic, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is big, roomy and enjoyable. The historical scenes are refreshingly unembarrassed by their hey-nonny-nonnyisms. The characters are lively, the plot moves along and the whole thing possesses heart and charm. And you don’t need me to tell you whether it tends towards a tragic or comic denouement. You can guess
Adam Roberts - Guardian (UK)
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.
Publishers Weekly
According to the dusty old documents military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons asks linguistics expert Melisande Stokes to translate, magic actually existed until the scientific revolution. The government's Department of Diachronic Operations aims to get it back.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Immense and immensely entertaining genre-hopping yarn.… Blend time travel with Bourne-worthy skulduggery, throw in lashings of technology and dashes of steampunk.… A departure for both authors and a pleasing combination of much appeal to fans of speculative fiction.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about Triston Lyones and Melisande Stokes. How would you describe them, their skills, personalities, inner strengths and weaknesses, desires, fears?
2. Why does Tristan hire Melisande? What are her skill sets that he believes qualifies her to do the work?
3. What does Melisande come to learn about the manuscripts? What are they in such good shape despite their age?
4. (Follow-up to Question 3) How was magic vanished or at least brought to an end? Where did it go? Explain the role photography played in its demise.
5. Talk about Doctor Frank Oda and his role in all this.
6. How about Erszebet Karpaty? And the Irish witch?
7. Talk about the D.O.D.O. — and the joke that runs for about 150 pages to uncover its full name. Did you find it amusing?
8. (Follow-up to Question 7) How would you describe the growth of D.O.D.O mirror into a bureaucracy: to what extent is the novel a satirical mirror of real life institutions?
9. There is a blizzard of memos back & forth. What were your feelings about them? Funny. Informative? Tiresome? Too many?
10. Were you able to pick up references to Shakespeare or, say, Monty Python? What do you think about the chapter sub-headings written in an 18th or 19th century style?
11. Comment on the conspiratorial machinations of The Fuggers (btw, there really is a Fugger bank dynasty, going back to the 14th century).
12. How did you experience Neal Stephenson's melding of technobabble with magic?
13. (Follow-up to Question 12) What challenges might be presented were time travel a possibility? How does Stephenson describe the technical issues?
14. What does the novel have to say about the human proclivity for foolishness?
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15. Well, what do you think of the book? The ending — satisfying or not?
(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)