Book Details
| Title: | Polostan | |
| Author: | Neal Stephenson | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 10.30.24 |
Other Books Read By This Author (6)
- Fall; or, Dodge in Hell
- REAMDE
- Seveneves
- Some Remarks
- The System of the World
- Termination Shock
| Date Read | Note |
| 10.30.24 | Sigh... so what is a "book?" Or really, what is a "story?" Does it need a beginning, middle, and end? Does it need a protagonist? antagonist? dramatic tension? plot? Are all these things required or not so much? Aside from a handful of authors that I follow, I'm really not super adventurous when it comes to reading so I don't know if there are tons of books out there missing all or some of these facets to which I'd usually call staples in the menu of a given story. I guess it points to why one even reads books! I suppose there's a bit of an unspoken contract going on between the author and reader to define a few bare-bones expectations between the two. A sort of contract that says stuff like "this is a non-fiction book about the civil war. At the end of this book you will know more about the civil war." or "this is a novel with a ghost on the cover, it will probably be scary and hopefully include a ghost." What Polostan gives you is that it's volume one of something called Bomb Light. Not "Bomb Light Trilogy," not "Bomb Light Cycle," just "Bomb Light." And you get an art-deco soviet-looking artwork with a silhouette of a woman at the center. While I suppose the cover is well-designed in that it does describe the contents of the book, that's all the book is! The entire book is essentially one character's backstory. Now, I do not read much historical fiction but I have read everything Neal Stephenson's written so I have exactly one work to compare this too which is his Baroque Cycle. Three gigantic tomes announced together, released 6-ish months apart (my memory is creaky on exact dates). It's what many argue is his best work which is crazy because he's primarily known as a sci-fi author. Each novel was around a thousand pages made up of two to three "books" each and I believe when they released them in paperback they split them into 8 physical releases. Now, Polostan is Neal's shortest work since Zodiac? And this read very similarly to Quicksilver except that with Quicksilver you had two more "books" to more deeply entrench you in some idea of what the series would be about and you knew that the series would be available in a year. With Polostan, i have none of that. So... I hate to say it but I should not have read this book yet. I'm now 300 pages deep in character for one person without any why it matters. It's the most disappointed I've been reading a Stephenson book. It's just a beginning. If he's going the route of splitting "Bomb Light" into smaller releases a la the baroque cycle paperbacks, that's his perogative, but again... we had context back then. What I'm left with now is collecting the further volumes until I hear they're complete before bothering to read any more. I'm bummed about that. Maybe in the future once they're all out and I've read them all I can look back at this and think it was a fine beginning to this epic saga, but that's not something I can determine now. |
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