Neal Stephenson mixes polo, politics, and power in the novel ‘Polostan’

Early in the fall of 2024, a new novel from bestselling author Neal Stephenson – he of the historical sagas, tech fables, and doorstop tomes – galloped onto bookstore shelves and e-reader screens. “Polostan,” a swashbuckling mashup of spies, science, politics, and polo, unfolds in the 1920s and ’30s against a backdrop of souring U.S.-Soviet relations and rising rivalries. At the story’s center is a Russian American girl straddling the worlds of her Ukraine-born Bolshevik father, who calls her Aurora, and her Montana-raised cowgirl mother, to whom she is Dawn. It’s a bold and captivating look at power, loyalty, and the sustaining impulse to chart one’s own path.

Mr. Stephenson recently discussed “Polostan,” the first in a planned series, via a video call with The Monitor. The interview has been edited and condensed.

You’ve described “Polostan” as a passion project. Which elements of the story first grabbed you? 

I like writing historical fiction. Of all the projects I’ve worked on in my career, the ones that I have the fondest memories for tend to be the historical books. Even some of my science fiction-y books have historical content in them. So I wanted to go back to writing historical fiction on a big scale. 

My secret sauce is anything to do with science and technology. [“Polostan” features] a hugely important era in the history of the modern world, but one of the things that makes it interesting and important is what was happening, unbeknownst to most people, in the world of science at that time. 

The Dawn/Aurora character is a classic outsider – a bit adrift, never quite at home in either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Has she been fun to write?

Oh, very fun. One of the things that I enjoy doing is taking established tropes from literature or film and trying to come at them from a new angle. So there’s an established trope of the femme fatale Russian female agent. I thought, If somebody like that really existed during the era that I’m covering here, the ’30s and ’40s, then how could such a person have come into existence? How could you have somebody who’s equally conversant in both the English and Russian languages to the point where native speakers of those languages would assume she was born and raised in their country?

It turned out it was actually pretty easy to tell that story in a realistic way because there was this era right after the Russian Revolution in the late teens and early 1920s, when there was a lot of back and forth between the Soviet Union and the United States. It was before we had the Cold War and before we had this state of hostility that’s existed between the two countries more recently. A lot of Americans with leftist sympathies went over there because they thought it was the future. And so it was pretty easy to find accounts of those kinds of people. It didn’t take long for them to sour on the whole thing and to see some of the negative aspects of what was going on. But for a few years people were going back and forth like this all the time.

Why polo of all things? 

The more I learned about the sport, the more I became aware that the way we think of it now isn’t the way people thought of it a hundred years ago. Now, it’s probably the most upper-crust sport you can do. But a hundred years ago, it was also a sport that was played routinely by cavalry units all over the world as a training exercise. So in the Soviet Union, they played polo there because they had horse cavalry. 

And then I became aware that there were polo-pony ranches in eastern Wyoming around Gillette, where these ponies were bred, raised, trained, and sold to the international market. The people who worked on those ranches who were cowboys, cowgirls – white, Native American, Hispanic, Black – they played polo because it was part of their job. You can’t train one of these ponies without using it to play the sport. So my idea of what polo was changed to something that cut through all strata of society. And that gave me the idea that connections could be made between characters who normally wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other.

This is such an interesting time to publish a story about U.S.-Russian spy games. How has the more recent history of the two countries shaped your thinking about the series?

The big change that occurred since I started working on it about 10 years ago was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then, I may have been more inclined to see Russia and Ukraine as kind of more sibling countries and capable of somehow relating to each other in a more friendly way. Since the invasion, I started to educate myself a little bit and learned about the famine, the Holodomor, that wiped out millions of Ukrainians in 1933. Until I learned a little bit more about it, I was inclined to accept the view “Oh yeah, it’s too bad, the harvest failed; bad things happen, what a shame.” But when you actually read about what happened, you can see it was a sort of deliberate act of genocide that was carried out by decisions made in Moscow. It was a way of crushing Ukraine, and absorbing it more completely in the system that they wanted to build. It shouldn’t have been news to me, but it was. 

Is the series all mapped out?

It’ll certainly be at least three [books]. Beyond that, never say never. The book is shorter and thinner than a lot of my books. That’s by design. My editor and I made the decision to bring them out as they’re ready, so publication will be spread out over a few years.