Post-Polostan

I am at least as surprised as anyone to have finished the new Neal Stephenson novel already. Even though I generally drop everything when a new one drops, it typically takes me at least several weeks and often a month or more to finish. Polostan really flew by, though: I read most of it in a weekend and finished off the last couple of chapters on BART.

 

The book is a quick read, much more REAMDE than Anathem, and blessed by a shorter page count than either. There's lots of fun technical digressions as you would hope for in a Stephenson book, but the actual plot is much tighter and less discursive than normal, and all of those technical digressions end up furthering the story in one way or another.

MINI SPOILERS

Before dipping into plot, a few technical observations:

I was thinking how impressed I was at Aurora/Dawn as a well-written female protagonist, but Neal has been writing those for a while now, especially in Seveneves and Fall. Then I was thinking how this book is special in that it has a sole female protagonist; but on further reflection, it's one of the only Stephenson novels to feature a sole protagonist. Even Snow Crash had YT alongside Hiro Protagonist, Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle had various Waterhouses and Shaftoes, Fall featured Dodge as a prime mover but had many other points of view. The only other book I can think of off hand with a similarly singlular perspective is Zodiac.

I was thinking a lot of Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day while reading this. Polostan chronologically picks up basically where Against the Day left off; AtD opens in the Chicago World's Fair (the Columbian Exposition) in 1893, hurtles towards the event horizon of World War I, and ends with the beginning of Hollywood. Polostan's story begins a few decades later and on the other side of the world in 1920 Petrograd, continues through yet another Chicago Fair (the Century of Progress), and ends in 1933 as the pieces begin to be set for World War II. As I noted in my earlier Pynchon post, both he and Stephenson have a strong grasp of the science and technology of the period, weaving it into their stories and unafraid to use it as metaphor.

Somewhat surprisingly, both authors also lean into leftist movements in these particular books. Stephenson actually addressed that during the Long Now talk. In what he couches as a "gross oversimplification," the US left was divided into geographic halves, West and East, with Chicago as the dividing line. In the East it primarily consisted of factory workers, often first-generation immigrants from Europe, who organized in labor unions and were receptive to Soviet-style centralized planning. In the West the movement consisted of mine workers, timber fellers, longshoremen, and others; this followed a much more anarchic bent, glorifying individual action and small-cell action over mass organization, and often featured pitched shooting battles between the forces of labor and capital. I hadn't thought of that framing before, but I really love it, and it places Against The Day's post-Repeal militants firmly in the center of that western anarcho-socialism tradition. And it adds another dimension to Christopher's "betrayal" in heading to an eastern college to continue his studies: even if he hadn't fallen under the shadow of the Scarsdale Vibe crowd, he couldn't have continued the Western struggle in the East.

That west/east explanation is repeated in this novel, with a great illustration: Aurora, trying to explain this schism in American culture with terms that will be familiar to her Russian companions, compares the Westerners to Cossacks, which I love.

The novel has a kind of interesting structure that I've encountered with other writers before but I don't recall having seen from Stephenson. It's sort of set in the "present" of 1933, with Aurora a young woman, but most of the content is told as flashbacks, proceeding in chronological order. She will reminisce about her childhood in a Petrograd komunalka, then return to the present in Magnitogorsk, then something will remind her of Chicago, and we'll see that, then return to Magnitogorsk, and so on.

MEGA SPOILERS

What's a little surprising is that there's nothing surprising: even though Stephenson isn't known for twists, I was half-expecting some twist to come out of this back-and-forth, some hidden knowledge in the past that would reshape my understanding of the present. That isn't really what it's about, though. We get a really complete story very early on from Aurora's casual conversations, and then the novel is about filling in the details. Why did her parents divorce? What did she mean by "giving birth to a monster"? Who got her pregnant? Why was she involved in a bank robbery? It isn't a great analogy, but it kind of makes me think of Vonnegut, telling the end up front to deliberately eliminate any suspense and then focusing on just telling the story.

I often wonder why authors choose to tell stories in the forms that they do. Long-time blog readers know that second-person storytelling in particular is kind of a bugbear for me: sometimes there's a clear reason for it and the story is more satisfying, interesting or cool than it would have been in first or third person; but absent that reason, it just feels affected and annoying. Here, it's interesting to think about what the story would have been like if all the Magnitogorsk passages had moved to the end and we'd gotten a straightforward chronological description of her young life. Maybe the Magnitogorsk parts would have seemed more boring in comparison to the pitched shootout that preceded them? Or we may be able to derive additional significance from past events by already knowing how they will play out or be perceived in the future.

The overall thrust of the book is that Aurora has led an unbelievably exciting life, moving between the US and the USSR, playing polo, meeting Major (soon to be General) Patton along with MacArthur and Eisenhower, participating in the Bonus March, supporting a suppressed communist plot to attach the White House, engaging in a pitched tommy-gun battle with federal agents, and so on. I hate the term "Mary Sue" but on its surface it seems a very Mary Sue-ish story. One big benefit, though, is that the unbelievability becomes the story, as the characters in this novel are rational and have a hard time believing all these wild stories could possibly be true; and, on the other hand, that they are so wild that they must be true, a liar wouldn't have come up with them.

Various topics Neal digs into here that I dig: how a blast furnace works, and related topics of metallurgy both ancient and modern; cosmic rays; the delayed discovery of the neutron, how it was discovered, and what it means (astonishing to see how nuclear power was understood when airplanes were still novelties); polo (more on that later); Soviet all-female machine-gun battalions (selected because operating a machine gun was not unlike operating a sewing machine); the in-retrospect-horrifyingly-widespread use of X-rays; fat and slow tommy gun bullets vs. powerful and fast rifle bullets; early-20th-century abortion laws and realities; Ukrainian famine; the design of Soviet and pre-Soviet rail lines; mixed reactions in the US to European fascism (roughly "Nazis bad, Italians OK").

Neal had also talked at the event a little about polo, which I definitely wasn't expecting to enjoy as much as I did. When researching that era, he was astonished at just how popular and widespread polo was: it and baseball were by far the two most popular sports. Today, we think of polo as the archetypal rich-people-only sport and see it as very niche. Why was it so much more popular back then? Well, because horses were a much bigger part of our society. You had lots of farms with draft animals, still quite a few horses in and between cities for transportation (as automobiles had been invented but were not yet omnipresent), and, most importantly, cavalry as a key component of nations' armies. Polo is a sport that teaches riding and horsemanship: not flat-out running for speed as in horse-racing, but maneuverability and precision, exactly the skills you want in cavalry. So there was an entire industry and culture around the cultivation of polo ponies and cavalry horses, which involved the entire range of racial backgrounds and economic classes: plenty of people who couldn't personally afford a horse worked in jobs involving horses, so there was a widespread connection to and affinity for the sport that we can't really imagine today.

I was glad to see that "Polostan" itself made an appearance near the end of the novel. I was a little worried it was just a clever title. But it was fun to see that the in-book character who names it is himself infatuated with the cleverness of the title.

END SPOILERS

This is also one of my shorter blog posts about a Neal Stephenson book! But this is just volume 1, I may have more to say as the series continues and the Bomb Light grows more vivid.