3.5. I really enjoyed my Audible edition! Mel 🖤🐶🐺🐾

This is the most fun I've had reading a Neal Stephenson novel since SNOWCRASH. Co-author Nicole Galland brings a nice light touch to the proceedings so that it doesn't delve too much into technobabble. Witches, time-travel, and governmental bureaucracy all combine to deliver a thrilling read that I finished over a single weekend. GOOD STUFF!

Full disclosure: one of the authors (Galland) is a friend. In fact she & I went out yesterday for a cup of tea. Because Nicki's a friend I really wish I could give the book 5 stars or even 4. But if I'm going to stick to my Goodreads grading curve, it comes in as a solid 3. There are parts that I really liked, and parts that I really *really* liked. But also there are whole sections that made me want to throw the book against the wall. (This is a not uncommon experience for me when reading a boo...

This was fun. A real lark of a story. Magic has disappeared from the world and D.O.D.O. want to bring it back. Time travel and witches will solve that. Right? What can go wrong? This is an elaborate use of the Schroedinger's Cat theory. It works. But what happens when motivations get muddy? This story is funny, interesting, blends science with fantasy & history. It's got a crazy mix happenings. It's hilarious at times. Told completely in an epistolary way through letters, diaries, memos, email,

What happens when you put time travel, magic, quantum physics, witches, a top secret military operation, alternate timelines, Vikings, a family of shadowy bankers, and government bureaucracy in one book? As you might expect, things get complicated.The story begins with the written account of Melsianda Stokes, a woman from our present who has become stranded in London during 1851. Mel tells us how she’s an expert in ancient languages who was stuck in a dead end academic career until she is recrui...

not a perfect novel but closer to five stars than 4this story combined beautiful timey whammy stuff and is driven by overall a beautiful book and with an open end so we may get more.😁please mr. stephenson and Ms. Galland may we have some more.

2ish stars. D.O.D.O. is a tiny, shady government entity that introduces us to the awesome combination of time travel and witchcraft. The organization starts out small with a lot of promise but then becomes mired in bureaucracy, more or less undermining its original intent. In parallel, Stephenson’s and Galland’s novel starts out strong with an original premise but soon hits a brick wall and doesn’t go anywhere. For 500 pages. As a satire of The System, the book is clever and often funny but it t...

Who likes naked Vikings? Raise your hand!I'm of two minds on this book. On the one hand, there are quite a few great ideas with the complications of surrounding witches with a humungous incompetent bureaucratic machine, especially when it turns out that they can do a lot of time travel. Not only that, but I was a huge fan of the acronyms and the lingo-speak, especially when a costume party gets told as if it's a major military-op or when a certain Lay of Wal-Mart is written. I was even mightily

Assuming you buy its premise and do not throw it away disgusted when it is - close but not quite imho though opinions may differ about that in quite a few places - jumping the shark (among many oddities, the novel contains a viking saga poem in verse cca 930's about the sack of an Walmart (!!) cca 2010's), this is a delight: funny (don't remember when i laughed out loud so many times when reading a book), zany, quite subtle on occasion (while it seems to start in our universe cca early 2010's, t...

Neal Stephenson-Cyberpunk King writing about witches and magic.Neal Stephenson- Speculative Fiction King writing about time travel, witches and magic.Neal Stephenson-Historical Fiction King writing about turning the thought exercise Schrodinger's Cat into an actual experiment which leads to time travel, witches, magic, and the military.Can it get any better? Oh yeah, there is an epic 10th century Viking saga about Wal-Mart.

Some general spoilers here, so that I am able to talk about what's troubling me with this novel.Dear reader, I am fucking heartbroken disheartened. Neal Stephenson is one of very few authors I drop everything for (quite literally). I dropped out psychology 101 to read the Baroque Cycle instead, I cram every book as soon as they arrive in the stores, and sometimes as an advanced reader copy. I can count on his books to be my reading experience of the year (well, maybe not the Big U...) and usuall...

I read an ARC of this with some bit of hope; Seveneves had fallen kind of flat for me, but I was hoping that a coauthor would help shore up some of Stephenson's weak points, and the idea of a time-travel story with witches was a good start. I do feel like Nicole Galland helped, but unfortunately, not enough to make up for some disappointing flaws.Let's start with the characters -- this was where Seveneves lost me, with the first two-thirds feeling like I was reading about cardboard cutouts movin...

What is it with big idea novels having to be so looooong!Seriously. I had this problem with that novel by Ada Palmer and I certainly had it with this one too. You have a big idea, we get it, no need to drag the damn thing out over more than 700 pages when half of that would have sufficed.In this case we follow a government agent (he's Army Intelligence, supposedly) who recruits a linguist. They then proceed to translate certain scripts, recruit Dr. Oda (a scientist formerly from MIT) as well as

To view my full review for Fresh Fiction please click the following link:http://freshfiction.com/review.php?id...

Absolutely superb! I loved every one of its 742 pages. So sorry to finish it. Fabulous!

Rounding up. What a shame! Why did Stephenson partner with another writer? Doesn't sound like his work at all. Too long and bloated-s story that could have been half the length and be much more interesting.

Some people are put off by the sheer volume of Neal Stephenson's books--they tend to be big, and useful as doorstops. But, I think they are all fantastic. This book is just as good as any of Stephenson's other books--and I have read almost all of them, including the incredible The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon. Without giving away any spoilers, this book is about magic and time travel, and handles both in a very logical, almost scientific manner. A few time travel paradoxes are mentioned, and