Polostan (William Morrow, October 15, 2024). Cover art uncredited

If, like me, you are a Neal Stephenson fan, you know he has a tendency to get deep into the descriptive weeds. I sometimes imagine his editor suggesting, “Neal, do we really need all this detail?” And then Neal grouchily responds, “If I didn’t think the story needed it, I wouldn’t have written it.”

Case in point from his latest novel, Polostan, a depiction of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair Century of Progress exhibition where the protagonist, Dawn Rae Bjornberg, also known as Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, works shilling for a shoe salesman:

She went to the fair early and stayed late, for the work was easy and there were plenty of diversions — that being the point of a fair.  Her perambulations soon made her as conversant with the place as if it were an old city…As they were meant to, [the exhibits] drew visitors: 600 Norge salesmen on the B&O from Philly; 176 newsboys on the New York Central from Buffalo; 60 Episcopal bishops; 180 Civilian Conservation Corps workers en route to turpentine camps in the southeast; 100 Minnesota National Guard troops. Paramount Studios executives from Hollywood, Lions from St. Louis, Shriners from Fort Smith…

It goes on like this for quite a while.  Do we really need to know that “Five hundred employees of the National Carbon Coated Paper Company of Sturgis, Michigan, arrived on the same train as 270 members of the Jewish Socialist Verband from New York City.” Probably not; it doesn’t further the plot, though it does provide a sort of Proustian vibe.

It’s also a metafictional joke Stephenson tells on himself. After Dawn/Aurora relates her life history to her Soviet inquisitor (which forms a kind of framework to a plethora of narratives, more about that in a second), he remarks, “You’ve been cooperative, if somewhat rambling. But that’s in the nature of your story — you really have been all over the place.”

“All over the place” is also how I’d describe this novel. But in a good way.

Born in 1916, a pivotal time in history when revolution was in the air, Dawn/Aurora’s childhood is split between Montana with her American radical mother and the Soviet Union with her Communist father (hence the American and Russian alter egos). Which makes her an ideal candidate for espionage against one of those countries. But which one is the question.

With an upbringing that includes acquiring equestrian skills, running guns and a fascination with Bonnie and Clyde as well as the Red Woman’s Death Battalion, the attention of then Major George Patton during an encampment of “Bonus Army” protesting World War I veterans in Washington, D.C.,  an abortion that makes her incapable of further pregnancy (and a matter-of-factly stated no-strings enticement to a prospective lover), and as a captive of con-artist evangelists as well as Soviet secret police OGPU led by the brutal Lavrentiy Beria. She is also witness to a deadly ballon ride by Soviet aeronauts named Elektron and Proton. We’ve already mentioned the Chicago World’s Fair.

But all of that is prologue and epilogue to Dawn’s chance meeting with “Dick,” a boy who impregnates her while on top of an early X-ray machine. Dick is probably Richard Feynman, who assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, but who here is a horny teenager happy to explain to Dawn current thinking in physics about possibly splitting the atom.  Which  makes her all the more a person of interest to Beria, who Stalin later appoints to head the Soviet atomic program. And which is why this is the first in a planned trilogy called Bomb Light.

Oh, and if you’re wonder what Polostan is supposed to mean, it is coined by British journalist Crisp-Upjohn, whom Aurora is tasked by the the OGPU to compromise, while playing against her during of an exhibition match with the Soviet women’s polo team. 

So there is a lot here to unpack. But that Stephenson pulls off in a highly entertaining and brisk way. Because that is what Neal Stephenson does.

What there isn’t is a lot of is pages. While Stephenson is noted for producing doorstops, even for individual books in a series (The Baroque Cycle, for example, adds up to some 3,000 pages across three volumes), Polostan is a mere 303 pages. You might wonder why the author just didn’t produce one big book, other than that genre publishing suffers from a multi-volume series fixation. According to the author, the intent is to focus on a different character in each installment. “As far as the series format is concerned, we made a decision last year to bring it out one normal-sized book at a time, and to configure it in such a way that each volume will focus on one of the main characters. “

Also, Stephenson hasn’t finished writing it. So, there is that.

We wait with bated breath. 

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David Soyka is one of the founding bloggers at Black Gate. He’s written over 200 articles for us since 2008. His most recent was a review of Playground by Richard Powers.