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Aug 20, 2017tjdickey rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
This extraordinary chronicle, as with so much of Stephenson's work, lives completely within its own genre, though some comparisons are possible. There are elements of "Groundhog Day" and "Dr. Who;" of Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis; of the '"Physick Book of Deliverance Dane" and of Grossman's "the Magicians," but "D.O.D.O." remains its own captivating and hilarious exploration of time travel and magic and bad office politics. Stephenson and Nicole Galland flow across a wide and comic variety of voices and document types from journals to emails to congressional hearings, explore an appropriately twisted set of temporal anomalies from the Fourth Crusade to Shakespeare's London to Colonial Salem, and stumble around a bewildering array of institutional acronyms (DODO itself, CRONE, DORC...!); as an example, there is a hilarious exchange of necessary inter-office memos on the Policy on Official Jargon and Acronym Coinage (POOJAC??), later shortened to the Jargon and Acronym Policy (JAP, emended to Acronym and Jargon Policy upon consideration of the Diversity Policy...). Add to the mix a shady cabal from the Fugger Bank, and the image of shiploads of naked Vikings pillaging a Wal-Mart outside of Boston, and the result is a truly unique melange from the mind of these gifted writers.