In Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland's 2017 novel The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. mixes the speculative fiction concept of time-travel with government bureaucracy and although it was a touch long for my taste, it was, in the end, a fun examination of how bureaucracies can ruin pretty much everything.
The novel follows a Linguistics doctor named Melisande Stokes, who after having a particularly disastrous run in with her academic supervisor, runs into a mysterious government officer who offers her a job.
The majority of the novel is told from Melisande's point of view, and is written as a document she has deposited in a bank from Victoria England, where she has been trapped in the past. Other characters and story elements get focus through internal memos, newspaper clippings, personal journals, etc.
The novel focuses on exactly how a government agency might go about setting itself up with a time-travel based department, and the increasingly byzantine obligations put on it as its importance raises over time.
Although it works strongest in concepts, rather than person to person interaction, in the end I found it to be quite a fun read.
Christian Cameron's God of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great (2012) is the last on my list of historical fiction set in Ancient Greece to focus on the Macedonian King during his life. Although I've still got six more books to go (and another by Cameron), this was the last to deal Alexander as a living man, rather than the legend he became.
For me, the novel had a lot of great strengths; putting the perspective character as his general Ptolemy was an excellent way to view the character from a different perspective (much as Mary Renault did in The Persian Boy) and also to slyly write a novel about the (arguably) greatest successor of Alexander, the battle scenes (as with all of Cameron's books I've read to date) were phenomenal, and the turning points in Alexander's life, where he goes from boy to man, man to king, and king to emperor, and at significant personal cost, were really striking to see from the point of view of a good childhood friend.
My biggest problem with the book was actually the length; at just under 900 pages it was fairly massive and I thought it could have either been pared down considerably or split into two novels, either way would have been fine by me, but I think that the narrative would also have moved better in either situation.
A really fun read, but perhaps not the first book I'd recommend for someone who wanted to read more about Alexander the Great.
