Polostan
First of three novels in the Bomb Light series
Neal Stephenson
3.89
3,933 ratings529 reviews
From Goodreads: “The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s three-part Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.”
GenresFictionHistorical FictionScience FictionAudiobookHistoricalThrillerFantasy
303 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2024
The protagonist in Polostan isn’t named Hiro. Stephenson already used that one in Snow Crash. She’s named Dawn in the West, and Aurora in the East. Dawn is an American communist who is fluent in Russian at a time when speaking Russian is deeply frowned upon. Aurora is an American in Russia. It’s the early 1930’s, when America hovers on the verge of collapse, trapped in economic crisis, and the Soviet Union’s infamous purges and pogroms of the Stalinist era are in full swing. The threat of imprisonment or even death is pervasive in both her homes.
She is there for MacArthur’s attack on the Bonus Marchers, in which her father dies and she is left with a suitcase full of ill-gotten gains including a tommygun. She is at the Great Chicago Exhibition to sell shoes and learn about cosmic rays. She is at a iron foundry in Russia at a time when shoes without holes are considered bourgeois and therefore decadent. Groomed to spy on westerners as a translator, her American background get her tossed in the local gulag for interrogation, where she survives only on the whim of a perverted Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.
Obviously, she does not lead a conventional life. In the hands of a lesser author, this might be just a silly ‘perils of Pauline’ sort of fable.
But this is Neal Stephenson, at the top of his game. The research, the local color and the depth of description and characterization are absolutely dazzling. Life is grim and exceptionally politically tense in both lands in the early 1930s, and Stephenson drops the reader in it so thoroughly you can almost smell the surroundings, whether in a lice-ridden barracks or in the slapped-together jail of a remote prairie county firmly in the yoke of a corrupt farming church family.
In the madness of Stalinist Russia, at one point, as a test of her loyalty, she is ordered to shoot her boss. Since this is the same guy who tested her loyalty by torturing her and decided she should be put to death anyway, this was one of Aurora’s easier decisions to make.
As with Cryptonomicon, the history is rich, detailed and thoroughly accurate. (I consider Cryptonomicon the best SF novel I ever read, even though it isn’t futuristic (it takes place in the 1940s and 1990s). But it so loaded with science that three months later I was still researching some of what I read in it.
In Polostan the science isn’t particularly dense, so this would fall into the category of great historical fiction, the best I’ve read since William Gear’s Civil War opus, This Scorched Earth.
The title refers to the introduction of Polo into the little Soviets in the southwest of the USSR. And yes, it will reassure you that Stephenson’s dry humor runs through the entire 300 pages.
And it’s just the first of three novels. Aurora is on her way to London just in time for the abdication of Edward VIII, the king who would be Nazi.
This bodes well.
Available wherever fine books are sold.