Polostan
Polostan is a 2024 spy novel by American author Neal Stephenson, and the first novel in a planned historical fiction series called Bomb Light. The novel received positive reviews from critics like The New York Times, The Washington Post and Kirkus Reviews.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
6people
2024–2026years
50% recommend33% neutral17% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Polostan went down very easy. only read Anathem, Snow Crash, Reamde, Fall;, and Cryptonomicon. Plolostan was a novella compared to those. finished in a day or two on vacation and im a sorta slow reader
i like Polostan and generally recommend it. looking forward to the sequel in a few weeks. havent read anything Stevensons said about Polostan but if i had to guess id say it targets a YA audience instead of a high school/undergrad audience
amazing none of his books have been adapted. they play out like movies in my head, albeit a lot of men participating in the socratic method and waving at white boards
- I just finished Polostan, and I think Doctorow's review is spot-on, nice to see another writer I like quite a bit so enthusiastic about both the strengths and quirks of the novel. I hadn't thought about it, but he and Stephenson both have a sometimes charming, sometimes maddening tendency to interject rambling discussions of things they have gotten personally interested in into their works, more so than most other SF authors I read (maybe Kim Stanley Robinson should be on that list too, realistically).
- Neal Stephenson has a brand new book out this month called Polostan. It's my favorite Stephenson book in a while. It's historical fiction in the Cryptonmicon genre.
- > Out of curiosity, are you a reader?
Very much so. I started reading adult novels at 7 years old, and by the time I was 12 or so, I could if I was hurrying read 5 or 6 novels a day. I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in 5 days at that age. I've reread it again another 4 times or so.
My personal library is somewhere in the region of 5,000 to 7,500 of my favourite books. I estimate that I have read at least twice as many books as I own, and probably more: in the tens of thousands, I'd think.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/6730645-liam-proven
I only started using Goodreads in my 40s though.
I am also a professional writer and have been for 30 years. I've had 2 short books published, many hundreds of articles for about 15 different print magazines and professional paid articles on 3 commercial websites.
Currently, I am the Linux and FOSS reporter for the Register:
https://www.theregister.com/Author/Liam-Proven
This was one of the hardest pieces to write for me:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/
I knew little of the man. I had to read at least 30,000 words about him in a single morning in order to learn enough about the man to write his obituary. It was hard work.
> When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun?
I have about 25 on the go currently. Most recent start was Polostan by Neal Stephenson. I also have 1 print magazine subscription on top of that, but mostly, I read online now, several tens of thousands of words a day every day.
I think it is far to say I am a big and voracious reader.
Why? Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it? No. I can at a push read about 3000 words a minute but I normally cruise along at 1,500 or so. When I see "estimated reading times" on things online, I typically find they are approaching 10x longer than I take.
FWIW I can also read 5 or 6 other languages than English, but I am painfully slow in all of those. Currently I'm reading a copy of Charlie Hebdo I bought at FOSDEM and the new Astérix album. :-)
- Neal Stephenson just dropped Polostan, I’m deeply into it right now :) Regarding scrolling, well, it does serve a certain purpose, too. Our brains evolved to be in the standby mode as much as possible, and without some serious gene splicing there’s no way around it. As long as you’re in a good place and your life is moving in a generally right direction, nothing bad about spicing it up with a bit of brainrot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- > Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere.
Stephenson discussed this a bit in the Long Now launch event[0] for "Polostan" and more or less confirmed what you suspect. He also went on to say that he has learned to reel that in and avoid those "rabbit holes". He avoids such digressions in Polostan, in my opinion to the detriment of the book.
