The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Is a Ridiculously Charming Time Travel Romp

It’s a book with a generous sense of humor and a keen wit, from the unusual way it handles time travel tropes, to the graceful way the characters banter with each other as they figure out how to manipulate the temporal stream to their benefit. It also incorporates a pure sense of wonder largely absent from a lot of modern time travel stories, and its offbeat qualities extend from the method of travel to the world it inhabits. The result is a delight to read, even when it’s delving deep into Stephensonian technical explanations of how magic works.
The story is told in journal entries compiled by Melisande Stokes after a government agent, Tristan Lyons, approaches her to translate a stack of mysterious documents. The papers lead to the stunning revelation that magic was, in fact, real…until something wiped humans’ ability to perform it sometime in 1851. With the help of a disgraced quantum physicist, his skeptic wife, and a short-tempered Eastern European witch, Stokes and Lyons discover how to perform a magic a spell that sends people through time, in the process forming the Department of Diachronic Operations (or “D.O.D.O”), a time travel agency dedicated to carrying out government operations and (hopefully) restoring magic to the world. That is, if enemies both witting and unwitting don’t rip the fabric of spacetime apart—or if the government doesn’t cut their funding before they get results.
This book oozes charm across a chunky 740 pages. Starting from the baked-in absurdity of government bureaucracy, Stephenson and Galland add in quirks of worldbuilding, from the clunky command-line interface the agents use (nicknamed “Shiny Hat”), to the cheerful and rational “mad scientist” who discovers a way to create quantum uncertainty by building a box to implement Schrödinger’s Cat—even the fact that they have to study magic as a science in order to get time travel to work in the first place. And then there’s that sense of wonder we mentioned—every one of the characters seems to really enjoy their work, and their enthusiasm at cracking the magical secrets of reality is infectious. Even the sardonic, anti-social resident witch can’t help but play with new tech toys when she gets the chance. D.O.D.O. is great fun to read about, and sure sounds like it would be a fun, if perhaps a somewhat dangerous, place to work.

While the book is told through memos and journal entries, the characters come alive, as each section speaks in a clear narrative voice—a swordfighting instructor who begins his guide on historical combat by telling people “DON’T DO IT” and peppers in “LOLs” like he’s trying to add humor, but hasn’t got the hang of being funny on the internet; Melisande’s habit of crossing out expletives in the text; the “conventional operations administrator” who tries to implement a more structured approach to D.O.D.O., only to find her professionalism thwarted at every turn, sometimes by her own attempts (using “POOJAC” as an acronym was a bad idea. Who knew?). Just as importantly, for a book that tries to give a technical explanation for magic-assisted time travel, it never bogs down in techno-babble. The extensive glossary of acronyms and jargon builds in such a way that, while there is a glossary in the back, you’ll probably never need to reference it.
All these qualities make The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. the most charming and engaging time travel book since Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog. Between the engaging cast, the witty dialogue, and the simple, offbeat absurdity of the premise, it’s truly a time travel fantasy with a ton of good cheer to match its epic page count. If nothing else, it’s the only book you’ll read with a Viking poem about the sacking of a Wal-Mart, and that’s worth the cover price right there.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is available now.