Neal Stephenson. Polostan. HarperCollins, 2024.
We are fans of Neal Stephenson. We have reviewed a few of his books on these pages over the years. Stephenson’s strength is coming up with new and clever scenarios. Sometimes people classify his material as science fiction. That certainly applies works like Seveneves. People see him as one of the originators of cyberpunk as we see in Snow Crash or Fall. But his best work may be the historical fiction involving science such as we see in Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle.
Polostan appears to be the first in another trilogy like The Baroque Cycle. It is fiction with science, but it is historical science. The Baroque Cycle included scientists such as Isaac Newton along with a crew of political and military figures. So does Polostan.
Unlike The Baroque Cycle which has a few main characters and switches focus from time to time, Polostan is all about one character. In some ways, she reminds us of Eliza, The Baroque Cycle’s female protagonist. Dawn, a.k.a. Aurora, was the daughter of American Communists. Born in 1916, most of the story takes place so far in the early 1930s when Dawn is a teenager.
When she was quite young, her parents lived in the Soviet Union for a few years before returning to the United States to foment a revolution there. As a result, Dawn speaks both English and Russian. Her story in Polostan takes place partly in the U.S. and partly in the U.S.S.R.
Dawn’s story in the United States tells mostly of two events in which she participated, the Bonus Marchers and the Chicago World’s Fair. We first meet her as she is leaving Montana, where her deceased mother had lived. There Dawn lived and worked on a ranch that specialized in polo ponies. She, then, becomes familiar with horses, cowboys, and playing polo.
The adventure in Washington, D.C., during the Bonus March is quite vivid. Her father is on the radical fringe of the marchers, and is looking to start the revolution. He obtains some Thompson Machine Guns (“Tommy guns”), but is ultimately thwarted. Dawn goes from there to Chicago where she knows some relatives and some Communists. Part of her adventure is how she manages to sequester the Tommy gun she has been given.
She arrives in Chicago in time for the World’s Fair, the Century of Progress. She works for a shoe store at the fair, and in her spare time learns a little about physics from different exhibitions. At one point she attends a lecture by Niels Bohr where she meets a boy about her age who explains a lot of physics to her. His family is visiting the fair from New York City. His name is Dick, and we are led to understand that this is Richard Feynman. At this point in history the neutron has just been discovered and we watch manned balloons in both America and Russia sent into the stratosphere to study cosmic rays.
While still in Washington, she meets Major George Patton. They become friendly because he likes horses and plays polo, too. However, she realizes that one of the Bonus Marchers she has gotten to know is actually a federal agent, so she decides to leave town. When that same agent shows up in Chicago (though for reasons that have nothing to do with her), she thinks it might be time to return to Russia. How a teen orphan accomplishes that is another adventure involving horses and a Mormon-type communal cult.
In Russia she is known as Aurora (or Avrora). Of course, Aurora is the Roman goddess of the dawn, but Aurora was also the name of a Russian battleship that figured prominently in the Russian Revolution. This is fitting since during the 1920s and 1930s many people named their children after things that related to science, industry, or the military. Solzhenitsyn mentioned how one man named his son Tractor. A Soviet scientist in Polostan has named his sons Proton and Electron.
While we meet several historical figures from America in the novel, the one historical personage who figures in the Soviet side of Polostan is Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police (the OGPU back then). The Soviets have a hard time believing Dawn’s story about being an orphan of American Communists who once lived in Leningrad. We get an idea of the oppressive nature of the Communist system as she is tortured. We also get a sense of how Communism devalues the family in favor of the state.
After being satisfied that she is no spy, she is trained to become an informant for the OGPU by reporting on Americans and British who visit the Soviet Union. Like Eliza in The Baroque Cycle, after many difficulties, she becomes a person who finds a place in a government operation as a spy.
The name Polostan does not emerge till near the end of the book, but readers can probably guess what it means. -Stan is the suffix used for naming a number of Soviet republics and oblasts, e.g., Uzbekistan is where Uzbeks live. Polostan, then, is a place in the Union where people play polo.
Even from what little I have shared here, readers can tell this is an inventive and creative story about a time period and a philosophy that still affects the outlook of many today. In other words, it can get the reader to think about our culture, an effect similar to that of The Baroque Cycle.
I do have one personal problem with it. Readers of the blog may note that I read the three books in the Baroque Cycle trilogy one after the other. It was a lot of fun and extremely intelligent. I can only compare it to reading The Lord of the Rings. Like the three titles in that series, Polostan does not stand alone. I am going to have to wait for the next volumes to come out. One friend who is also a Stephenson fan told me, “I hope I live long enough to read the whole thing.” Ditto.