Neal Stephenson has been churning out novels at the rate of one every four years or so since 1984. His interests are protean. Early on (The Big U, Zodiac), he skewered higher education, environmentalists and corporate polluters. He then shifted to speculative works set in a plausible near future (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age). There, he coined the term “metaverse”, and show-cased 3-D printing technology long before it came into use. An image has stuck with me over the decades: a motorcycle riding outlaw keeps others at bay with a small nuclear device in his sidecar.
He moved on to historical fiction, starting with the marriage of Boolean logic and electric relays to create the first computers during during World War II in Cryptonomicon, then heading back hundreds of years to 17th century London (The Baroque Cycle, a trilogy). Having visited the present, past and future, he turned to fantasy (Anathem). By this time I was fully committed to reading whatever he chose to write, and devoured Reamde as soon as it came out. In this fast-paced witty thriller, he cinematically follows a young Seattle techy who drops down the rabbit-hole of a phishing email. Next up: a space odyssey spanning 5,000 years following the incineration of earth by an exploding moon as the few remaining human survivors wander the solar system waiting for their planet to cool – Seveneves. The “real” world not being broad enough for his palette, he moved into cyberspace where the rich and adventurous can upload their consciousness and continue interacting with those left behind. Finally, back to reality in Termination Shock, featuring a mash-up of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Which brings us to his most recent offering, Polostan, the first of a promised trilogy, the Bomb Light Cycle. Unlike his earlier works, this clocks in at a breezy 300 pages, making it a comparatively easy read. “Comparatively”, because Stephenson displays his wide-ranging curiosity as he disjointedly follows Dawn Rae Bjornberg in her peregrinations during the early 1930s. She finds herself, in short but no particular order in the Chicago World’s Fair, our nation’s capital, fundamentalist North Dakota, the American outback of southeastern Montana where cowboys nurture polo ponies, and the blast furnaces of a Siberian Soviet iron works.
Dawn, still in her late teens, shows precocious coping skills gained from her parents’ disparate backgrounds. Her father is a full-throated Wobbly communist who takes her to the Bonus Army encampment in Washington, DC the summer before FDR’s election. She spent half her youth in the USSR and the rest on a ranch in Big Sky country, becoming fluent in both cultures and languages.
While the story is ostensibly about Dawn and her personal perils, Stephenson has other interests layered within her story. There are hints the two future volumes will focus more heavily on the rapidly growing knowledge and technology which will lead to the harnessing of the force within the atomic nucleus. The political turmoil on two continents of the early Depression years is ever in the background. Characters pulled from history books (George Patton, Richard Feynman among them) guide Dawn’s fortunes.
In Polostan, Stephenson plays with time as he constructs the story. As he bounces among the varied locales and dates, he helpfully provides the locale, month and year at the start of each chapter. Telling Dawn’s tale with a disjointed chronology is a bit difficult for the reader, but works well at bringing out both her complex personality and the breadth of its import.
I’ve always found Stephenson to be a challenging, yet approachable writer. He insists on sprinkling his own wide-ranging interests throughout whatever story he is telling, much like Thomas Pynchon. He does take more care with his sentences than Pynchon, but one certainly can’t leave their intellect behind when entering their worlds. Each also has a penchant for dropping in paragraph-long lists which provide a condensed picture of what is happening both within and without the mind of the central character. It always pays to fully absorb them, slowing down while progressing through the multiple commas and semi-colons.
Befitting a trilogy, Polostan ends with a cliff-hanger. Dawn and a newly-introduced character are riding horses at the end of a polo match, heading in separate directions, promising to meet again soon, “out in the world.” I can’t wait.