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
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 […]