Neal Stephenson

Peter Suderman | 10.16.2024 10:26 AM

Critics sometimes gripe that Neal Stephenson's sprawling, discursive, episodic, prop-up-your-laptop-sized novels may be smart, but they need focus and paring back. Too many of his novels have approached, or even run past, the thousand-page mark. In this view, he needs an editor, a groundskeeper, someone to trim his excesses and check his enthusiasm.

Yet part of the pleasure of a large, long Stephenson novel is the sheer expansiveness of his vision, the vastness of his imagination, the marvel of his world building, and the sly comedy he wrings from it. Stephenson's cinderblock-sized books are geeky odes to editorial noninterference.

Those critics might enjoy his latest novel, Polostan, which runs just over 300 pages, making it his shortest in decades. The book is lean and light, but it's far from slight. Even in its slimmed-down form, it retains Stephenson's sense of comedy and awe-struck enormity. Like a skinny person on Ozempic, Polostan still feels suspiciously like a much bigger book. It's a characteristically grand, Stephensonian vision, about the perils of Communism and the tumultuous glory of scientific progress. Or at the very least, it's part of one.

To some extent, the book's sense of scale is a result of the subject matter: Polostan is a story about the dawn of the atomic age.

Set largely in the 1930s, it sweeps across the Soviet Union and the United States in an era of momentous change. The Soviets have embraced a cruel and all-encompassing Communism. The United States is in the midst of its own political-social upheaval, with anarchists and agitators scattered across the country, plotting ideological victories and fomenting unrest. And in the background, the pace of scientific discovery and accomplishment is accelerating.

But it's also because of the way that Stephenson simply gravitates toward large-scale engineering projects and mechanical........

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