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

Tristan Lyons hires Melisande Stokes, a Harvard linguist, to translate historic texts for a classified government agency, the Department of Diachronic Operations. Her translations point to a past in which magic was real, and the agency sets out to bring it back and to send operatives back in time. A comic novel by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland about magic, bureaucracy and what changing history might cost.