Polostan

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This book is "Volume One of Bomb Light". And it's a mere 303 pages of text, considerably downsized from Neal Stephenson's previous doorstops. And (slight spoiler) it ends on kind of a cliff-hanger.

Hm, could it be a cold-blooded marketing ploy to get us Stephenson fans to pony up for two (or three, or four, or…) volumes instead of one?

Doesn't matter. Buying Stephenson books in hardcover is simply paying my fan club dues.

Back when I read Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" books, I speculated (more than once) that he had a time machine to zap back to the past times and places he described with such meticulous and vivid detail. Here, he fires up that device once again for the 1930s, visiting both the USA (San Francisco; Washington D.C.; Chicago; Seattle; Fort Sickles, North Dakota) and the Soviet Union (Moscow; Magnitogorsk; Leningrad nee Petrograd, nowadays Saint Petersburg).

Those are all visited by Dawn Rae Bjornberg whose exploits this book follows. She's a devout Commie, but also an independent spirit, and that's a tough role to play in both countries, especially when you keep finding yourself in situations of violence, betrayal, x-rays, balloons, and … well, also the "Century of Progress International Exposition", aka the 1933 Chicago World's Fair.

There are also cameos from actual people: military men, Commie thugs, and (oh yeah) a teenager who will someday become a famed scientist. No spoilers here, but, yeah, I've blogged about him a lot over the years. (And, yes, he actually attended the Chicago World's Fair, according to his biographer.)