The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O.

Nicole Galland, Neal Stephenson

HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2017 - Fiction - 749 pages

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

About the author

Nicole Galland is the author of six previous novels: Stepdog, Godiva, I, Iago, Crossed, Revenge of the Rose, and The Fool's Tale. Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, was born on October 31, 1959 in Maryland. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography with a minor in physics. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984. It received little attention and stayed out of print until Stephenson allowed it to be reprinted in 2001. His second novel was Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was published in 1988, but it was his novel Snow Crash (1992) that brought him popularity. It fused memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology. Neal Stephenson has won several awards: Hugo for Best Novel for The Diamond Age (1996), the Arthur C. Clarke for Best Novel for Quicksilver (2004), and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The System of the World (2005). He recently completed the The Baroque Cycle Trilogy, a series of historical novels. It consists of eight books and was originally published in three volumes and Reamde. His latest novel is entitled The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O. Stephenson also writes under the pseudonym Stephen Bury.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O.; Volume 1 of The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O. Series
• Authors: Nicole Galland, Neal Stephenson
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited, 2017
• ISBN: 0008132577, 9780008132576
• Length: 749 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary; Fiction / Fantasy / Epic; Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Science Fiction / General; Fiction / Science Fiction / Time Travel