‘Polostan’ is the Most Engaging Book of the Year

Despite its obscure title, Neal Stephenson’s Polostan is by far the most engaging book I have read this year. The 320 pages flew by.

The novel gets its name from a witty upper-class English reporter who appears in its closing third and dubs a vast sandy area just south of Moscow, Polostan. In the novel, the Soviet spy apparatus uses these fields to stage an elaborate ruse in which a women’s Red Army polo team – brought into being for the event – would play a game and catch him in its net. Stephenson relishes the fact that an actual cowgirl brought up in Montana and St. Petersburg might be the wildcard player in such a game. Indeed, he revels in the very anachronism of armies keeping polo teams to train their cavalry while the burgeoning atomic era is marching in. And, to presage that era, he tells the story of that very same cowgirl seeing Niels Bohr and selling shoes at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair–the Century of Progress.

We best know Stephenson for his science fiction: Snow Crash (future hacking), The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (future nanobots), Cryptonomicon (split timeline code-breaking genocide deterrence), among quite a few others. However, he is also a brilliant writer of historical fiction. He set half of Cryptonomicon in World War II, Anathem stretched from prehistory to future albeit in a speculative world, and his majestic Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, Confusion, The System of the World) encompassed Europe just as it was pivoting from being run by feudal Lords and the Catholic Church to being driven by early capitalist economies from Protestant countries.

It is to this last cycle that Polostan harks. Again taking place at a pivotal moment in history, this Stephenson novel is both a personal adventure story and a continent-hopping tale that takes place just as the new political empires of the Industrial Age are forming. Our protagonist grows up as the United States is taking up its mantle as a world power, as the Soviet Union is coming to terms with its post-revolutionary parameters, and as Europe is preparing to tear itself and its colonies apart in World War II.

This protagonist is a tall and slightly awkward girl (and then young woman) whose two names explain some of how she stands both for — and also astride — the two nascent superpowers. As Dawn Rae, she is a country child of the Montana sunrise: as Aurora (also meaning sunup) she takes her name from the cruiser that fired the first shot at the Winter Palace in the 1917 Russian revolution. As a reader might imagine, complexities about this dual identity continue to arise but — as with some of the chronological details of the naming that she explains under Cheka (pre-KGB) duress — the rapidly unfolding plot allows information to fall out like confetti.

Dawn is a believer in the freedom of America (from her American momma) and Aurora quotes the rights of man (from her Russian father), while as Ms. Bjornberg (a real name) or Svetlana or Miss Glendive (assumed ones), she acts in the knowledge of law’s utter contingency. This latter she inherits from her biological father, the outlaw Jim O’Faolain, with whom her mother slept when her father was unable to conceive a child.

World history unfurls around Dawn/Aurora: she witnesses Italo Balbo’s Decennial Air Cruise arrive in America, Richard Feynman comes to Chicago to explain Bohr to her, Patton rides out of the White House to greet her as he goes off to defeat the Bonus Expeditionary Forces. Those unhappy Bonus Marchers were protesting the government and asking for their pay, but it was Aurora’s father who led an embedded Communist cell intending to spark that unrest into the overthrow of the regime by the people.

Seemingly the long-delayed series interrupted by the 2015 Seveneves (the moon explodes), the 2017 co-authored The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (history changes through magic), his 2019 Fall; or, Dodge in Hell (immortality through mind uploading to the cloud) and then 2021’s Termination Shock (climate engineering), Polostan has been worth the wait which bodes well for the rest of the Bomb Light series. Stephenson has said that his superpower is writing novels and he may well be right.