Neal Stephenson Jumps From Speculative Fancy to Strange History

In an era of exponentially advancing technology, staying ahead of the curve can feel like a full-time job. This fairly describes the career of acclaimed science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who invented the term “metaverse,” cemented the notion of a digital “avatar,” and received oblique credit for the rise of Bitcoin—all while writing doorstop-sized literary novels.

So keen is Stephenson’s anticipatory knack, he’s been hired at companies like Blue Origin and Magic Leap just to sit around and think—working at the latter, an augmented reality startup, his title was “Chief Futurist.” It’s therefore surprising that, twenty pages into his latest excursion (then fifty, then seventy), the speculative takes a backseat to history.

The novel, Polostan, is a detective story set mainly in the 1930s, in a slew of cities and rural outposts scattered across the US and USSR. Unlike Stephenson’s previous opuses, which resemble multiple books sandwiched into gigantic tomes—Cryptonomicon and Reamde both clock in at over 1,000 pages—this one is slim, about a third of that size, and boasts a correspondingly streamlined plot.

Stephenson and I meet up for an interview the day of Polostan’s release, October 15. We’re in the backroom of Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington, some 10 miles north of downtown Seattle, and Stephenson faces a stacked array of more than 300 hardbacks that he’s been asked to sign before the Polostan book tour kicks off in a few hours. The author jogs his legs when he thinks, and he’s thinking now about the way that our shared past is tied inextricably to the future. “When you dive into almost any part of history deep enough,” he says, “you’ll find things that really happened, but that read like science fiction.”

Polostan isn’t Stephen’s first full-length historical rodeo—that would be The Baroque Cycle, a series that began with 2003’s Quicksilver—but it’s situated at a uniquely imaginable leap to the present day: there are living Americans who experienced the Great Depression. “There was a lot happening that feels like turning the page,” Stephenson says of the interwar period. “Prohibition gets done away with. The Depression is on. The Nazis are coming to power. There’s a manmade famine in Ukraine. So to me, it seemed like a good place to start.”

Polostan, the first novel in a cycle entitled Bomb Light, features a succession of increasingly intimidating nuclear brainiacs, up to and including the physicist Niels Bohr, whose appearance produces a classic Stephenson cramming session: Chadwich, Joliot, Curie, the discovery of the neutron. “The chain of reasoning,” Stephenson writes, “though long, wasn’t that difficult to follow.” (If you say so!)

Stephenson’s fans are used to this by now. The author has always wrangled science into his story arcs, and he does so again here, though not nearly as much as in previous endeavors, e.g. Anathem’s in-depth geometric proofs. By keeping the jargon light and the characters central, Polostan manages a plot that, while not quite breakneck, scooches admirably along.

Stephenson’s scientific narrative shines in a meeting of upper-echelon Russian secret police. It’s the winter of 1934, and they’ve called in some young experts to brief them on atomic physics outside of a labor camp in frigid Magnitogorsk, an industrial town 1,000 miles east of Moscow. “We live in this intermediate layer of medium-sized nuclei that are stable enough to form complicated molecules that support life. Bellow us, massive nuclei are decaying in a hellish sea of lava. Above us, light nuclei are combining to make starlight…”

A hellish sea of lava? Truly, this is the sci-fi of history. The meeting has been called by one of Polostan’s many historical figures, Soviet spymaster Lavrentiy Beria. It also includes real-life politicians Sergo Ordzhonikidze and Vissarion Vissarionovich Lominadze. The fictionalized contingent centers on Polostan’s steely heroine, “Dawn Rae O’Faolain, aka Dawn Glendive, aka Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva,” also called Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born to a Montanan anarcho-cowboy mother and a committed Russian Marxist father, Dawn sounds straight out of Jim Dodge’s excellent (and somewhat forgotten) Stone Junction. But Stephenson goes out of his way to make her life convincing, both from a timeline perspective and that of her personal desires.

“For the first part of her life,” Stephenson tells me of Dawn, “she’s just observing a range of circumstances and events that most kids would never get exposed to, going through these huge swings between what she sees in Russia and in the Western United States. So she grows up being self-reliant, dealing with all these stressors, and she also has roots in this cowboy mentality that’s pretty tough.”

Tough is one word for it. In close third person narration, Dawn gets dunked into the icy Ural River, smuggles an unassembled tommy gun onto hobo-filled railcars, and refutes advances from “Old Blood and Guts”—Major George Patton, another historical inclusion—by the Fort Myer polo field outside Washington, D.C. Writing women isn’t necessarily Stephenson’s strong suit: there’s too much worry about clothes, and a recurring strain of hyper-virginal thought that borders on the implausible. (In genre fiction, we might call this “Robert Jordan Syndrome.”) Regardless, Dawn makes for a swell detective. Stephenson says a key aspect to her character is that, “She’s been drawn into some pretty deep waters and has to make her own way. That’s kind of an American sensibility.” These underdog credentials certainly make Dawn simpatico, even if her steely sexlessness prevents full on sympathy. Still, gender does play a role, as it allows her access to intelligence-gathering circles and causes men like Patton and Beria to underestimate her.

Thanks to her cross-national childhood, Dawn is also an excellent sociologist. Polostan is as much concerned with historical anthropology as it is with century-old scientific claptrap. “Something seemed to be wrong with America,” she tells a new comrade upon arriving in Magnitogorsk. Conversely she realizes, “miracles no longer belonged in the Soviet Union, so ice and gravity were doing their best to tear it all down.”

In the heart of the Great Depression, much of the world lived within spitting distance of poverty. This didn’t stop the afflicted from trying to find their way out. Just as Dawn acquires knowledge about the recently discovered neutron, she absorbs the myriad political credos of people in her orbit, in particular those of her communist father. “You were born into a red dawn,” he tells her, “and now, even though I don’t believe in superstitions, I think that these red sunsets mean something.”

Stephenson grew interested in interwar leftism after moving to Seattle in the 1980s. “Seattle was kind of a hotbed of the Wobblies,” he says, referring to the Industrial Workers of the World. “There was a big exhibition at the UW [University of Washington] library years ago. They had posters about some infamous clashes: the Centralia Massacre, the Everett Massacre. So that was on my radar, and I knew that the origin story of my character was going to be somebody born in the late teens, immediately following the Russian Revolution. There was a whole phenomenon during those years of idealistic American leftists going over to Russia, because they thought it was the future. So that led me back to, okay, what were American leftists doing at the time?”

“The cause” drags Dawn and her father down to the Bonus Army protests in Washington, D.C., a group of 43,000 demonstrators, nearly half of them veterans, who camped out on the Anacostia Flats in 1932 to request the early disbursement of service bonuses from WWI. Stephenson’s century-old D.C. feels eerily familiar—“The early evening sun was now cutting in under the clouds, shedding amber light on the Washington Monument”—especially when some of the veterans hatch a plan to capture some government real estate.

“I wrote a lot of this before January 6,” Stephenson says. “It seems crazy now, but the security apparatus in those days was way, way less intense. You could just kind of wander around into government buildings. And some of these guys had seen it done in St. Petersburg, right? You can imagine some of the guys talking themselves into believing it.”

“Major Patton says that just popping off a few rounds, scaring them away, isn’t how to do it,” a young soldier tells Dawn. “They don’t stay scared long. And when the smoke clears, well, now they’ve got a couple of martyrs. He says you gotta make a statement—inflict mass casualties.”

The political echoes are unavoidable. But as far as drawing contemporary parallels, Stephenson says, “I’m not necessarily looking for that.” He found a few obvious opportunities but focused on crafting Polostan as a tight story with a convincing heroine. Alas, Dawn will cede her spotlight in the series’ second book—Stephenson is writing the sequel in close third person from a different protagonist. He made this decision in conjunction with editor Jennifer Brehl at William Morrow, who often brainstorms with Stephenson before large projects. “We have a pretty predictable, cool way of proceeding,” he says. “I develop an idea, we talk about it, et cetera.” In the case of Bomb Light, Stephenson knew he could either cycle perspectives or stay close to one character at a time. “At the end of the day, the best thing to optimize on is having something that’s readable and that works well as a story. Simpler is better.”

Simpler is better? The aphorism sounds funny coming from a guy whose previous wordcounts neighbor War and Peace. With Polostan, however, it holds. Stephenson isn’t looking into the future here. But even in a relatively abbreviated outing, there’s an awful lot to learn from the past.