I knew as soon as I stumbled across this book online that we were destined to be together. A chunky book about a time-travelling government department attempting to reinstate magic? Yes please. DEFINITELY yes. So when I accidentally stumbled across a signed copy in London's Forbidden Planet, I honestly didn't shut up about it for days. I got home, read it immediately... and still haven't shut up about it. Sorry everyone (but not that sorry).
Plot summary:
1851 England
The Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace has opened, celebrating the rise of technology and commerce. With it the power of magic – in decline since the industrial revolution began – is completely snuffed out. The existence of magic begins its gradual devolution into mere myth.
21st Century America
Magic has faded from the minds of mankind, until an encounter between Melisande Stokes, linguistics expert at Harvard, and Tristan Lyons, shadowy agent of government, leads to the uncovering of a distant past.
After translating a series of ancient texts, Melisande and Tristan discover the connection between science, magic and time travel and so the Department of Diachronic Operations – D.O.D.O. – is hastily brought into existence. Its mission: to develop a device that will send their agents back to the past, where they can stop magic from disappearing and alter the course of history.
But when you interfere with the past, there’s no telling what you might find in your future…
I loved this book. Loved, loved, loved this book. I always knew I was going to, but I feel like it defied even my highest of expectations.
It's almost like a way more detailed and technical version of The Chronicles of St Mary's series - I always complained that the concept was great but it was hugely lacking in detail - and now we have The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. In this book, we get to see the creation of the organisation from the ground up, as the machines are invented and the concept of D.O.D.O. (Department of Diachronic Operations) comes together. It could be boring, but it's not. It's time travel and so I will suck up every scrap of detail and love it.
It's told through a variety of different formats, but not so many that it becomes wearing (I'm looking at you, Illuminae). We mostly see mission reports and journal entries, but there's the odd internal company memo or policy briefing to add a dry and fun sense of humour. I wasn't over keen on the letters from Grainne O'Malley (a 16th Century witch) as I really didn't like her and they dragged on a bit but, looking back, they probably were necessary to the overarching plot, so I won't complain too much.
Ohhhhhh, the plot. It's ingenious. A lot of time is spent on setting the scene and I loved every second. However, the actual over-arching point of the novel is deeply hidden and quite subtle, so that you start to feel genuine little twinges of anxiety before you even really know what's going on. It's hard to pinpoint, but it's there. When it really gets going, towards the end, my stomach actually hurt, I cared so deeply about the characters. It's honestly a masterpiece.
Of course you get some detail of their time-travelling exploits - what's the point of a time travel book otherwise!? I loved Melisande travelling back to bury a rare book, and managing to navigate the 16th Century slightly better every time she headed back. I'd probably have liked more of that, but not at the expense of the amazing plot so I'll pipe down. There's a reasonable amount there anyway, in fairness.
I can only imagine how long it took Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland to plan this book. Not only the set-up of D.O.D.O. but the intertwining threads of narrative that come together to make absolute sense. It is time travel, after all - it's not meant to be simple. This is the only book I've read by these authors, but I've already added a few more to my wishlist.
The only problem with The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is that I was torn between frantically needing to read it, but then not wanting to read it because then I'd have finished it and couldn't read it anymore... *breathes into a paper bag*
Visit Neal Stephenson's website here, or find him on Twitter.
Nicole Galland can be found here.
NOW READ THEIR BOOK.
TIME TRAVEL. An organisation that investigates historical events by GOING TO VISIT THEM. Why did I not know this series existed!? I feel like you all seriously breached your duty of care by not informing me that these books existed. The Claim Form is in the post; expect a call from my lawyer. This is the best idea ever and I can't wait to read the rest of the Chronicles of St Mary's series.
Plot summary: Behind the seemingly
innocuous façade of St Mary's, a different kind of historical research
is taking place. They don't do 'time-travel' - they 'investigate major
historical events in contemporary time'. Maintaining the appearance of
harmless eccentrics is not always within their power - especially given
their propensity for causing loud explosions when things get too quiet.
Meet
the disaster-magnets of St Mary's Institute of Historical Research as
they ricochet around History. Their aim is to observe and document - to
try and find the answers to many of History's unanswered questions...and
not to die in the process. But one wrong move and History will fight
back - to the death. And, as they soon discover - it's not just History
they're fighting.
Follow the catastrophe curve from 11th-century
London to World War I, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction
of the Great Library at Alexandria. For wherever Historians go, chaos
is sure to follow in their wake....
This has 'Hanna' written all over it. I discovered it, bought it and immediately sat immobile for an entire day and devoured it. It has its faults and some of them did irritate me (no surprises there), but I loved, loved this book.
It's a relatively simple idea - St Mary's Institute of Historical Research is partnered with a more traditional university, who are paid to investigate aspects of certain historical events. The University contacts St Mary's, and two historians toddle off to the Cretaceous Period, or the building of West Minster Abbey, or the Somme. They come back with the data and everybody wins. It's actually quite well thought out - the safety checks, briefings, contingency plans, etc.
There is actually a detailed over-arching plot, which impressed me. I expected Just One Damned Thing After Another to be a sort of set-up book for the series, just sorting out the Institute and how Max got her job, etc. I suspect this storyline is convoluted enough to last throughout the entire series (seven books at time of writing) and it surprised me that such an idea was implemented halfway through Book One.
It's very fast paced... actually too fast paced. I would have liked it to take its time a little more, I think. Events occur in quick succession with no time to properly deal with what happened, whether a personal problem or a trip back to the past. I need more detail! It makes it difficult to care about the characters when you're essectially just given a list of what they did, in chronological order. Take some time and explain. I mean, the point of the book is that these people jump back in time but the historical events are almost skimmed over. They jump there, see a dinosaur, and jump back. I picked this up for the time travel, so why skim over it? If there were only more detail involved and the characters only had a sense of wonder, these books would be perfect.
Ironically, this book doesn't deal with the passage of time well. Max is a trainee, but suddenly she'd finished her training and then suddenly she'd been there five years and there were new trainees. It was a little confusing as there were no indications of the time that had passed. It leads back to the lack of detail explained above, I suppose.
The book drags on just a little too long. Something happens that would have been a perfect place to the end the book, but then Max has a revelation and we go on to deal with that. It carries on past the natural ending for the book and the tone is immediately changed. It's just... odd. I can't help but think that it would have been a better idea for that to comprise Book Two, and then Book One could have been expanded with the detail and explanation that I so desperately crave!
I did absolutely love Just One Damned Thing After Another and I already wish that I owned the rest of the series, instead of just the second book, Symphony of Echoes. It was an effort not to just pick it up and plough ahead, but I decided to give myself a little breathing room. It's a great idea, authored by somebody who clearly loves history, it just needs a little more detail and to slow the pace down somewhat.
Cross Stitch, the first book of the Outlander series that has recently been made into an Amazon Prime TV show, has been on and off my wishlist for years. I'll add it because it seems fun and interesting, but then remove it a few weeks later because it looks unecessarily long and it must have a Mills and Book-alike cover for a reason, right!?
My point is, I could have read this book years earlier. I hate that.
Plot summary:
In 1945, Claire Randall is back from the war and reunited with her
husband on a second honeymoon in Scotland. Innocently she walks through a
stone circle in the Highlands, and finds herself in a violent skirmish
taking place in 1743. Suddenly she is a Sassenach, an outlander, in a
country torn by war and by clan feuds.
A wartime nurse,
Claire can deal with the bloody wounds that face her. But it is harder
to deal with the knowledge that she is in Jacobite Scotland and the
carnage of Culloden is looming. Marooned amid the passion and violence,
the superstition, the shifting allegiances and the fervent loyalties,
Claire is in danger from Jacobites and Redcoats - and from the shock of
her own desire for James Fraser, a gallant and courageous young Scots
warrior. Jamie shows her a passion so fierce and a love so absolute that
Claire becomes a woman torn between fidelity and desire, and between
two vastly different men in two irreconcilable lives.
Do you ever get that feeling where you know you're going to fall in love with a book by the end of the very first page? On the face of it, the blurb doesn't sound like my usual cup of tea at all. I mean, peri-wartime nurse gets transported to 1740s Scotland where she falls in love with a manly rebel... BUT SHE ALREADY HAS A HUSBAND!? No, thanks. I'll be alright.
Except I don't think I could possibly be alright if I never got to finish this series. There's just something about the tone of the book that infers a touch of respectability to a plot that could turn very silly very quickly. There's a pervading atmosphere throughout, whether Claire is on an isolated Scottish moor or in a bustling castle kitchen, it always seems so real. If I had to sum this book up in one word, it would be 'immersive.' Whenever I picked up this book, I instantly became part of the fictional world - it's just that well-crafted.
Initially I was worried that this would go over my head as I know next to nothing about this period (or most others, to be fair) of Scottish history, but it takes the time to explain what's happening without ever being condescending. To be fair, the rebellion and the Jacobite plots form more of a sub-plot than the main focus anyway.
There was one point in the story that actually made me literally gasp out loud. A plot twist that I'd never have seen coming and it just made absolute perfect sense. I had to put the book down and excitedly text Charlotte, just in case she'd somehow missed this gigantic revelation when she'd read the book herself. She hadn't, naturally. But it's just SO GOOD.
I quite liked Claire herself, and she did have the potential to annoy me rather a lot. I appreciated how she didn't just immediately accept that she'd been transported to 1743 and merrily go on her way, like a lot of other protagonists in these books. It took her a while to come to terms with the implications of her new life and to actually believe what the hell was going on. That takes an awful lot more effort to write than "Oh cool, Scotland, you say!? Awesomesauce."
The one thing that bothered me about Cross Stitch, and I'm not usually sensitive to this kind of thing, was Jamie's treatment of Claire. Well, no. That's not strictly true. I understand that, in the past, women were treated in a manner that we now see as barbaric, and it would be unreasonable to expect historical fiction authors to pretend it never happened. So I can deal with that. I wouldn't say I enjoy it, but I accept it as probably not being too far from the truth.
What did bother me was Claire's complete acceptance and self-justification of the beatings she received. She made a token objection at first and then managed to totally reason it out to herself, and it WASN'T because she was trying to hide her identity. I just feel that this isn't in keeping with a World War II nurse somehow - you have a backbone in the rest of the book, where did you hide it then!?
It also doesn't show a lot of consistency for Jamie's character, which comes across throughout a lot of the novel. He's sold as the gentle, educated Clansmen, to the point where we're constantly told that he's a 23 year old virgin because he's never found the right woman. Fair enough. But then he's actually quite horrible and possessive to Claire, over and above what you'd expect from a man from 1743 (because naturally I'm an expert in such things). I'm having trouble reconciling it as anything but an excuse to shove in some aggressive sex and spanking scenes. Speaking of which, NO MEANS NO, arsebag.
I should add that I can't help but see him as the kilted pirate from Essgee Production's version of The Pirates of Penzance. My mother and I know it intimately although it doesn't do Jamie a lot of credit...
Cross Stitch is 880 pages long but I read the whole damn thing in a few days and I could happily have read more. It's so immersive, even when Claire is just sat cleaning out medical supplies. It's atmospheric and fascinating and... argh. It doesn't matter whether you're in a backgroundy bit or an action bit, it's equally engrossing. I feel like I need the second book, Dragonfly in Amber, quite desperately, so I'm sure you'll be hearing from me soon. In the meantime, READ THIS.
I bought this off the back of Ready Player One, which I loved and I've been trying desperately to find something similar ever since. I haven't quite managed but I have found some really interesting books along the way. Redshirts is one of them and definitely one of the best - I completely fell in love with its geeky sci-fi tone and little nods to pop culture.
Plot summary:
Ensign Andrew Dahl has just been assigned to the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union since the year 2456. It's a prestige posting, and Andrew is even more delighted when he's assigned to the ship's Xenobiology laboratory. Life couldn't be better ... although there are a few strange things going on:
(1) every Away Mission involves a lethal confrontation with alien forces
(2) the ship's captain, the chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these encounters
(3) at least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.
Suddenly it's less surprising how much energy is expended below decks on avoiding, at all costs, being assigned an Away Mission. Andrew's fate may have been sealed ... until he stumbles on a piece of information that changes everything ... and offers him and his fellow redshirts a crazy, high-risk chance to save their own lives ...
So I'm going to sit here with my blue hair, my large black glasses and my 50s dress and cringe a little as I talk about how 'totally meta' this book is. Apparently I've morphed into a fully-fledged hipster and I now loathe myself a little bit. Still, there's no getting around it - Redshirts is meta, I do love it and I am going to talk about it.
I love books like this. The Thursday Next books, Between the Lines... books where you're involved in the storytelling or where the creation of the book is part of the whole plot. I was instantly, totally and absolutely hooked about three pages in.
Essentially, it's a sort-of-but-not-really parody of Star Trek and those other futuristic sci-fi shows, where dramatic events continuously unfold but every episode is always self-contained. There are four people, main characters, who always survive, possibly injured, but they recover ridiculously quickly and then there are the redshirts. The expendable crew members, a few of whom die every episode just to point out to you how dangerous the mission is. Redshirts is their story.
Let me just say first of all that you don't need to have seen Star Trek to love this book. You only need to know what I've just said - that the main characters always survive and and someone expendable always dies. Oh, and there's usually some dubious science kicking about as well. It's self-explanatory and I assure you it it's hardly a difficult concept anyway.
As befits the genre it's parodying, it does sometimes take a second or two to work out the 'science.' I mean, the writers of Star Trek didn't exactly put a lot of effort into making their sci-fi logical or rational (and it was fine, it worked regardless) so a similar style has been recreated here. Either that or I'm giving John Scalzi too much credit and his knowledge of physics is just rubbish!
I admit that it lost me a little bit when I reached the epilogues. Well, they're called 'codas,' but they're essentially epilogues. Which I hate. I have incredibly mixed feelings about these chapters. First, I accepted their existence as they do sort of add something new to the story, although I wasn't sure if they quite fit the theme. Then I basically turned into Hanna Hulk because one of them is written in the second person and this infuriates me. Then the last one is quite deep, quite philosophical and I really enjoyed it and started wondering if maybe I just hated them on principle? Confusing.
Redshirts is so much more than a parody. It's funny, clever, occasionally philosophical and really made me care about characters I expected to be two-dimensional and flat. I loved this book an awful lot more than I expected to, and I can't recommend it highly enough, regardless of whether you've ever seen a Star Trek episode in your life.
Read Katie's review of Redshirts at Katie Who Can Read.
You have no idea how much effort it is for myself and other British bloggers to type out that book title. It's painstakingly slow - 'One-One-Two... No, that can't be right. There is no 22nd month. Two-Two-One... Is that right? It must be. Oh wait, no. One-One...' I swear I'm going to start a damned petition to give this book a logical name.
Plot summary - WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11.22.63, the date that Kennedy was shot - unless . . .
King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 - from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life - a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
As the Lit Addicted Brit so famously (kind of) said - 'THIS is why I read!'
This book is amazing, and it broke me. There may as well be no other books. It's long and occasionally heavy, but it genuinely stopped being just a story for me. I cared more than was reasonable about all the characters and felt so tense over certain plot twists I could have been sick. This is a story about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But not really. It's also a story of time travel, morality, romance, science fiction and friendship, with a little bit of creepiness thrown in for good measure. This is Stephen King, after all.
Being British, I had very little knowledge about Kennedy's assassination - the extent of my Presidential information tends to revolve around their vampire hunting skills. However, this is not a hindrance to 11.22.63 in the slightest. It doesn't presuppose you know anything at all, but judging by the amount of care and detail that has clearly gone into researching this book, you'll be an expert by the end.
That said, it's written very accessibly. It's definitely not for children (however much you may want them to learn their history), as some of the more violent scenes even made me feel ill. The tone is vaguely similar to The Gunslinger but as we all know how much I liked that (stop talking about your penis, Roland), it's fairly obvious the two aren't otherwise much alike.
I actually wrote in my notes how it was less creepy than Stephen King's other books, but then I felt obliged to cross it out after a week of being convinced something was Watching Me from the darkness. It is creepy, but it's hard to ascertain why. It's certainly not meant to be a horror book; at face value it's merely a historical novel. There is something though - something that maybe means you turn the hallway light on instead of wandering down it alone at night. It still haunts me now, so there are definitely two levels to 11.22.63 - the basic time-travel story with a darker layer slipped underneath.
The ending broke my heart and mind into so many little tiny pieces that I could barely function. I just kind of... sat there for a very long time, contemplating how everything could have ended up the way it did. It's perfect and it fits the story, well, perfectly but oh how it hurt me! I hated it. Well, I didn't hate it; I understand it. But I kind of hate it.
I know this is a rambling (and probably useless for everybody who isn't me) review, but I have literally nothing bad to say about this book. Every word has a purpose and every character is historically and fictionally relevant. It would make a brilliant film and it's easily, easily the best book of 2012 at Booking in Heels.
