Noeal Stephenson is known for his enormous, sprawling, infodumpy mega-novels: all-encompassing works that extrapolate technological and social change into the near future or trace it through the past. His breakthrough book, 1992’s Snow Crash, is a cyberpunk technothriller set in part in the “metaverse” – Stephenson appropriated this term for immersive virtual reality long before Facebook’s Zuckerberg. He followed it up in 1999 with the 918 page Cryptonomicon, about Alan Turing, code breaking, mathematics, economics, gambling and many other things. 18th century, set Baroque Cycle (2003-04) is the best part of 3,000 pages long, packed with historical, scientific, speculative, and digressive information. Ream (2011), another gritty technothriller is more than 1,000 pages long, extended further with the nearly-900-page 2019 sequel; Fall or dodge the underworld. For Stephenson, there is more.
Polostan looks like a change of direction: a lively 320 pages of sharply plotted, vividly moving historical events, set in the 1920s and 30s. The story follows Dawn Rae Bjornberg, born in the United States to a Russian Communist father and an American mother, who juggles her upbringing between two nations: Dawn is in the US, Dawn is in the USSR. When the Reds run through the US, when the FBI gets involved, they run machine guns. Returning to the Soviet Union, he works in the construction of the huge industrial city of Magnitogorsk, until he is locked up in a psychiatric hospital – which the authors assume various stories, playing polo with a young George Patton, meeting Bonnie and Clyde, giving birth to a monster baby, are delusions. When they find out all the truth, they take a spy from the Americans and interrogate her. The sequence in which he is tied, naked, to a machine on a metal bed and repeatedly crushed in the coldness of the Ural River is brilliantly horrifying, like a scene from the first James Bond novel. Finally it was released. He meets Beria and agrees to spy on the Soviets, or so it seems.
Throughout the focus is on character and incident, instead of the usual excesses on technology, science and social history. Or more precisely, this is only a small one. Aurora conceives a child on the first X-ray machine, causing her lover to realize the nature and effects of radiation. But for the most part, Polostan keeps the story moving: old US donkeys, hobos riding rails, poos playing polo, the Chicago World’s Fair, high-altitude lifts, murders, flight and accidents.
Polo – a joke about the creation of the Soviet women’s polo society gives its new title – is an interesting game. On the other hand, it is a privilege. What ordinary operation can a man or woman perform to buy and stabilize an elephant pole? Besides, as he understands new things, it was a long part of his life: to train and maintain horses, ready for battle, and the polo is the reason for doing this. It is not only the super-rich who play polo games; You too are denied. The new rich man and the poor man excelled in two centuries and corresponded to each other in ways.
And in prose too nimble, lively and to the point. Here Aurora saw the Russian high altitude balloon launch:
The hangar doors were suddenly flung open, letting in a rush of sunlight and cool blue air. The lorry man to the gondola, which was mounted on the trailer, to the field where the balloon was beginning to climb to the mound… All the time the balloon kept getting bigger, peeling itself off the ground and growing to a size that was surprising. Aurora had never seen the like before. Then, at any point, the story of physics preceded it and the matter soon came into the air. What seemed so great, in the space of a few minutes became very little. For some time there was a white star in the northern sky. Then they rose through a veil of high, icy clouds and disappeared.
He went away, as it is said, into the distance of the swift watcher.
Unusually for Stephenson, Polostan is a straight historical novel, without any fantasy or SF elements. I found myself reading this very interesting creation, proving Stephenson’s change of writer in the part. It was only when I got to the end of my model testing that I realized that Polostan was only one part of the project series, the Light Bomb cycle. It is possible that, as subsequent installments are added, the entire meganovel will accumulate in typical infosprawly fashion after all. It doesn’t matter: this book works like a sign and ends neatly, an excellent coming-of-age story in itself.
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