★ 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.
Summer means different things to different people, depending on their age, their life situation, their life goals—and their reading habits. Some folks read their one book a year over the summer, lazing on a beach. Others sail into June with a reading list arranged alphabetically and by length. Some just like to wander into bookstores […]
You might be forgiven for assuming that magic is, well, magic—a supernatural ability to do things that violate the laws of reality. That is a pretty good description of magic, which is awesome. Except if you’re a writer, in which case it becomes a problem: once you introduce magic into your story, you must come […]
2017: the year that became an adjective. A year during which the only status quo became the lack of one, and the only thing stranger than the day’s trending Twitter topics was the next day’s trending Twitter topics. Wherever you come down on the merits of the past 12 months, there’s no denying the fact […]
In sci-fi and fantasy, heroes tend to wield huge two-handed swords or have bandoliers of ammunition strapped over their impressive physiques as they rocket through space and time. Or, sometimes, they are brainy mad-scientist types who kick butt via chemical reactions, superior intellect, and possibly a time machine disguised as a police call box. Rarely […]
Though ostensibly genres of escapism, some of the best and most entertaining government agencies—hardly two words synonymous with “fun”—ever conceived were invented by sci-fi and fantasy writers. Of course, these speculative agencies, departments, and extra-legal bureaus tend towards the ungovernable, the incomprehensible, and the unregulatable—which makes them more or less just like the government agencies […]