I approached Polostan warily because the last Stephenson novel I read (Fall - or Dodge In Hell) was an absolute stinker. But I was initially heartened by this novel's period setting, a realm where Stephenson generally has been quite successful, and that its scope seemed relatively limited while poking at events that are on the fringes of well-known history. Polostan is a told from the viewpoint of Dawn aka Aurora, a young woman brought up initially in Leninist Soviet Russia with an American mother, than taken to America with her international communist agitator father. The story is largely told whilst she is being interrogated by Soviet party members who are suspicious of her wild tales of riding the rail, procuring tommy-guns for a putative workers uprising in Chicago, and her faked death at the hands of Bonnie And Clyde. And there is also the Polo, whih she becomes and expert on through her mother's family ranch, and then it becomes a way of her code shifting between social classes (again allowing her to interact with a few famous people). All of this is still small scale for Stephenson, and the interrogation framing device does a good job at both drawing what this period of Soviet Russia was like and also showing Dawn's tenacity.

Billed on the cover as the first part of the Bomb Light cycle, it does have a rather open ending, one assumes to be picked up in a later book (I fear Dawn may not necessarily be the lead in that, something I found frustrating in the Baroque Cycle). But by the time the novel catches up with Dawn's present and offers us a breathless tale of survival and crafting into a spy, it also gets her to face some of the horrors of the period in the starving multitudes of Ukraine. There is some real grit in the history here, even if there is also a wistful what-if question around the potential US Revolution (but then say Hiooverville to anyone these days and they won't know what you're talking about). A surprising joy and page turner, and as future books dig further into the Atomic age (the other subtext in the book), it will be interesting to see if there is a grander aim than just compelling historical fiction. Part of me just wants to see more of Dawn, over some grand project. Unless she kills Hitler obviously. A real joy and return to form.

Neal Stephenson is a great writer with lots of interests and interesting things to say but sometimes he just can'y get our of his own way. Polostan, the first book in a projected "Bomb Light" trilogy, is a great example of this,. There is a story in there somewhere but it is burined beneath screeds of historical fact posing as narrative and walk on roles for actual histotrical figures.
The main character of Polostan, an eighteen year old girl called Aurora (among other things), is frankly unbelievable and makes engaging with the narrative (such as it is) extremely difficult. If this was a romance she would be a mainc dream pixie - a sixteen year old revolutionary with an interest in physics who manages to charm the top American brass, and put together a submachine gun - who at eighteen voluntarily returns to Russia to work in an iron smelting plant,,, oh and she plays polo.
Polostan is actually one of Stephenson's shorter efforts and yet still it feels overburdened with facts, figures and real world events (there is over a page describing all of the people Aurora meets at the 1933 Chicago World Fair following pages and pages of description of the Fair itself). I'm not sure there is enough here to bring me back for the sequels.

I was looking forward to this very much. The author's best books are among the best books I've ever read. His ability to paint speculative universes is nigh unparalleled, and the rich details these universes benefit from are a huge part of what makes them lifelike. This book, however, is not this.

The book tells the story of a young woman, Aurora (fka Dawn), who is born in the 1920s, and exists in the intersection of the Soviet Union and America. The book is set in the "present" (mid to late 1930s) and the "past", where we understand more of Aurora's history and background, and what led her to become a spy (of sorts). This story is, as usual for the author, a vehicle for him to geek out on detail, factoids, and anecdotes, bring the world of those years to life. The research that went into this is genuinely impressive, and the characters that the book gives rise to are viable, realistic, and are a product of their time.

That being said, I struggled with this book quite a bit. While it read well (as does almost everything the author has ever written), this book feels even more of an information orgy than anything else by him. It's so pronounced that I found myself struggling to understand, as I was reading the book, why I should care about any of what was happening. It's like the plot was so much less important than the setting that there was little effort to create a thrill. The story element of the plot felt shallow and underdeveloped. Having finished the book, I still struggled to understand why I should have cared about any of it. Perhaps, investing more in Dawn's psychological development and trauma would have created more of a sympathetic character than I would have learned to love and care about. As it was, the various episodes in her life felt so out-there and her decisions relating to these situations so odd that I kept wondering whether this was the "real" Dawn, or a construct that was created by Dawn in order to tell a particular narrative for a particular purpose.

Either way, I wish the author stuck to speculative fiction, rather these pet projects (similar to the Baroque Cycle, in that sense). There is still everything that makes the author shine, but the distinct lack of energy and excitement for the project comes through.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of the book in return for an honest review.

He avoided meeting Aurora's eye -- as well he might. She didn't imagine this kind of situation was covered in Emily Post. It must happen a lot, though, in the Soviet Union: bumping into persons who had tortured you or murdered members of your family. [loc. 3279]
First in new trilogy 'Bomblight', Polostan is the story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, also known as Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva. Dawn is the daughter of a Russian communist and an anarchist cowgirl from Montana. After a childhood in Leningrad, where she's tended by a veteran of the Red Women's Death Batallion, she spends her teenage years trailing around the USA after her father, who is very much in favour of workers' rights. This period of Dawn's life culminates in marching to Washington as part of the Bonus Army and helping to facilitate armed insurrection against the US government. She also encounters, and flirts with, George Patton: and she attends the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago in 1933, where she works as a shoe saleswoman, hears Niels Bohr lecturing, and has a brief fling with a young man named Dick (who may be Richard Feynman). Then off to Russia via San Francisco, to resume her Russian identity, introduces the game of polo to the Soviet Union, and encounters Lavrentiy Beria -- not in a good way, though luckily she's too old for him.

I found this very readable, and quintessentially Stephensonian: behold our fearless, intrepid and engaging heroine, who hobnobs with famous men and attends an advanced physics lecture despite having spent much of her childhood avoiding school, who uses sex as a weapon or a distraction, who endures ill-treatment with dignity and an offhand quip... I did like Aurora/Dawn, though, and the famous names aren't as plethoric as in the Baroque Cycle. And I do like Stephenson's prose style, with his liking for lists and his wry observations. Looking forward to seeing where this trilogy is going!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 26 SEP 2024.

Parts of this book are brilliant, and if you are interested in such fantasy about early twentieth century Russia (USSR) and USA you may love this book.
It was spoilt for me by the continual punishing of the main protagonist, often in a sexual manner.
It was a bit too like a James Bond novel for me.
I learnt quite a bit about scientific history, including the discovery of neutrons, which for me was very interesting., and the story of the Century of Progress Exhibition was interesting.
I will continue to read Neal Stephenson books, as I believe that he is a gifted author.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Neal Stephenson's shortest solo novel since Zodiac takes its name from the site of the first appearance by the Red Army women's polo team. Why does the Red Army have a women's polo team? Well, that's the story, or part of it. After doing his best to prove nominative determinism with the fumble that was Fall, and one I skipped entirely for that and other reasons, this feels a lot like Stephenson making a deliberate return to Cryptonomicon territory, a story about the birth of the modern world that treats historical fiction like SF and logistics like hymns, setting an invented, idiosyncratic yet somehow representative cast loose among real people of the day - including at least one of the same historical figures. We're only a decade earlier, after all, with most of the novel taking place in the 1930s, a dark time where the only thing worse than the cruelty and wastefulness of capitalism was the cruelty and wastefulness of the rival systems taking shape to either side of it. As before, Stephenson carefully selects his pieces from both the obvious signifiers of the era (gangsters; Soviet psychiatry) and the more outre (the Bonus Army; the building of Magnitogorsk). Our heroine is Dawn in the USA, renamed Aurora in the USSR, and ends up having a terrible time in both; there's a particular strand of unjust imprisonment narrative that really gets under my skin, and thanks to the way Polostan's narrative jumps around, here I could enjoy it in stereo. Fascism, at least, remains mostly an offstage horror for now, but that seems unlikely to last through subsequent books in the series, especially when Stephenson is clearly interested in the contemporary parallels; there's a particularly grim stretch reminding us of Russia's past form when it comes to committing atrocities in Ukraine and then lying about it with the assistance of Western shills. But mixed in with the horrors are romance, adventure, and above all discovery - it's so easy to forget how recently the neutron was discovered, or that within living memory the sheer existence of aeroplanes was a thrill, rather than a locus for chiselling and faff. This is very much a first installment of Bomb Light rather than a story complete in itself, and to some extent I am reminded that in other territories the individual books of the Baroque Cycle were themselves broken down into more manageable units. But there's still plenty to get your teeth into, without it being as formidable as his doorstoppers.

(Netgalley ARC)