Polostan

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

Polostan is a 2024 historical novel by Neal Stephenson, the opening volume of a planned trilogy under the working title ‘Bomb Light’. Set in the Soviet Union and America of the 1930s, it follows a woman who is the daughter of a Russian father and an American mother, both committed leftists, through the espionage, industrial ambition, and ideological infatuations of the decade. Later volumes are planned to follow other characters — including one only glimpsed in Polostan — through the 1930s physics discoveries that fed into the Manhattan Project, converging by the 1940s with the Nazi rise, Stalinism, and the Spanish Civil War.

In the wiki

• Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels — the novel is the occasion for Stephenson’s conversation with Tyler Cowen. He explains the title was chosen partly for search-engine practicality (publishers now reject titles that will not auto-complete cleanly) and partly because the sport of polo recurs through the story, with the joke behind the word explained only near the book’s end. Stephenson uses the novel to discuss the psychology of espionage and his scepticism that the Soviet leak of atomic-bomb secrets was highly contingent, Western intellectuals’ infatuation with early Soviet communism, and a structural parallel he draws between 1930s America and the USSR — each pairing a densely industrialised core with a vast, sparsely populated, resource-extraction hinterland and a poorly treated indigenous population.

See also

• Neal Stephenson — the author
• Neal Stephenson on History, Spycraft, and American-Soviet Parallels — the episode