
Polostan
Bomb Light, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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January LaVoy
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By:
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Neal Stephenson
About this listen
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Termination Shock and Cryptonomicon, the first installment in a monumental new series—an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age.
The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.
Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.
©2024 Neal Stephenson (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. In the present, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia....
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Two thirds through and quit
- By Joshua on 06-20-16
By: Neal Stephenson
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Interface
- By: Neal Stephenson, J. Frederick George
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 25 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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In this now-classic thriller, he and fellow author J. Frederick George tell a shocking tale with an all-too plausible premise. There's no way William A. Cozzano can lose the upcoming presidential election. He's a likable midwestern governor with one insidious advantage - an advantage provided by a shadowy group of backers.
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Interface
- By Dianne on 08-14-10
By: Neal Stephenson, and others
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Snow Crash
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 17 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Neal Stephenson is a blazing new force on the sci-fi scene. With the groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, he has "vaulted onto the literary stage." It weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility - in short, it is the gigathriller of the information age.
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A solid sci-fi novel
- By Brent on 02-05-03
By: Neal Stephenson
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The Starship and the Canoe
- By: Kenneth Brower, Neal Stephenson - foreword
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Freeman Dyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist who dreams of exploring the heavens and has designed a spaceship to take him there. His son, George, a brilliant high-school dropout, lives in a tree house and is designing a giant kayak to explore the icy coastal wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
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Excellent Story - Captivating, Poignant, Educational
- By Anonymous User on 11-25-20
By: Kenneth Brower, and others
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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
- A Novel
- By: Neal Stephenson, Nicole Galland
- Narrated by: Laurence Bouvard, Shelley Atkinson, Laural Merlington, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From best-selling author Neal Stephenson and critically acclaimed historical and contemporary commercial novelist Nicole Galland comes a captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.
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Exceptional voice cast, unconventional format
- By Jesse on 07-03-17
By: Neal Stephenson, and others
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Sinner
- A Prequel to the Mongoliad
- By: Mark Teppo
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 1 hr and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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A severed head and a cry of “Witchcraft!” start a frenzied witch hunt in a sleepy German village. When her dead husband’s severed head appears on her doorstep, a local woman is charged with practicing heretical rituals. It is up to the knights to discover the truth behind the brutal murder before the torches are lit and the woman is burned at the stake. Their task proves daunting, though, as the townspeople have their own long-buried secrets and sins that they want to keep hidden - even if it means allowing the sacrifice of an innocent woman.
By: Mark Teppo
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Error
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Detlef Bierstedt
- Length: 45 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Es ist nur ein Spiel. Aber es geht um sehr viel Geld. Und für manche bald um ihr Leben...
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great storry! fantastically narrated!
- By Anonymous User on 06-16-17
By: Neal Stephenson
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Corvus
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Detlef Bierstedt
- Length: 39 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Der neue SciFi-Bestseller von Erfolgsautor Neal Stephenson. Als Richard Forthrast, genannt Dodge, überraschend früh verstirbt, erfüllen seine Angehörigen seinen letzten Willen: Er hatte verfügt, dass sein Gehirn konserviert werden soll, bis die Technologie es eines Tages ermöglicht, die Daten seines Bewusstseins zu erfassen und hochzuladen. Viele Jahre später gelingt es dank eines komplexen Verfahrens tatsächlich, Dodge digitales Leben einzuhauchen.
By: Neal Stephenson
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New Found Land: The Long Haul
- By: Austin Grossman, Neal Stephenson, Sean Stewart
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Evans, Elizabeth Jasicki, Graeme Malcolm, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Original Recording
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Imagine two worlds at war. In one, citizens with jetpacks and ray guns have colonized Venus. In the other, magic reigns supreme, and history turns on swords and spells. Now imagine they have just discovered a third world. Our world. Our timeline of rideshare apps and strip malls is about to become the newest battlefield in the long war between science fiction and fantasy.
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You'll like this if you liked The Zeta Family.
- By Tory Thai on 06-12-21
By: Austin Grossman, and others
What listeners say about Polostan
Highly rated for:
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- PapaStitch
- 11-09-24
New hero!
 The construction of the main character Dawn Rae in the light of the history she grew up in and the forces that shape her nature, abilities, suffering and viewpoint, show a consistency that Stevenson has always created in the characters he puts forward
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- Kathleen K. Prati
- 12-19-24
Entertaining from Start to Finish
The story left me hanging and wanting more. I love the heroine, and Neal Stephenson’s tale is chock full of scientific history and witty tale-telling of Russian, American, and European relations in the forties and fifties. I thoroughly enjoyed part one of Stephanson’s new trilogy.
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- Bouncybrit
- 10-19-24
Political Intrigue, Science and Polo in the Cold War
This is a great start to a series, can’t wait for the next installment. Dawn/Aurora is a fascinating character and the political machinations set amongst the scientific discoveries and culture of the 1930s makes for Neal Stephenson at his best. (I’m just waiting for Enoch Root, a Waterhouse or a Shaftoe to make an appearance)
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4 people found this helpful
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- Kirez A Reynolds
- 11-03-24
10/10 on rich character, cracking plot and action, and profound scientific and political history!
What a character is Aurora!!! Stephenson has grown and leveled up; hard for me to say, since I love his entire body of work so much. But he excellently treats this history of the USSR (and underground history from the US Great Depression.)
(You can read a novelization of the same period and an American woman and her offspring, like Aurora an American communist (but Aurora is learning the hard way) in Sana Krasnikov’s _Patriots_, also set in both Magnetogorsk and back in the USA, so coincidentally similar to the events and settings of Polostan!)
Aurora strikes me as an improved, deeper treatment of the heroine America Shaftoe from Cryptonomicon.)
I love this whole novel.
I believe Dick is Richard Feynman, which means he is 15 years old when Aurora meets him.
Fantastic capture of Physics and realistic, accurate capture of the scientific process and zeitgeist in the 1930s, leading up to the invention of the atomic bomb. I suspect that’s where this series is going. I’m all in!
One tragic flaw in this audiobook: unforgivable mispronunciations of the Russian names, throughout. Like nails on chalkboard.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Justin D. Lilly
- 11-26-24
The ending
Did not see it coming and it was delightful. Thank you Neal! You’ve been my favorite author since you first started writing. Cryptonomicon is my top and both read and listened to it multiple time’s. I managed hedge funds, am a software developer, and a crypto investor so it was prophetic for me. But this one is special for a different reason. On Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale on a motorcycle quest across the country, where the Hohokam would hike to the top on their vision quests, I received a clear message of my life purpose. “An Usher for the Divine Feminine.” Took 20 more years to begin to understand. So I really appreciate seeing a man take the chance to dive into feminine consciousness and create a female hero in a patriarchal world. Brandon Sanderson is wonderful at it too so if anyone loved this book for similar reasons you should check out Skyward or Yumi or Tress or one of my favorites, Mistborn. Love you dude and thanks for providing some of the best grist for my imagination mill.
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- James Weisner
- 12-27-24
A period fiction adventure story
This is a well-written, exciting, and action packed book written with a nod here and there to Stephenson's nerdy audience. But it's not science fiction, and I missed that. It's period fiction set in the early to mid 20th century. Half of it takes place in the Soviet Union which is entirely unpleasant (read: historically accurate). For such a long book, not a whole lot actually happens. I hope this is setting up a good sequel in this Bomb Light series. We'll have to wait and see. If this setup ends up being brilliant, I might come back and increase the star rating on this review.
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- S Clegg
- 01-10-25
Can’t wait for the next book in the Series
The story captures the world story before world ww2
With a cast of characters I loved with a great story
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- Seth F.
- 10-22-24
an alchemy of the past
if you liked the Baroque cycle, you will like this book. it is, in many ways, like starting that series over but at a different point in time. it has the same depth of history mixed with a thrillers plot points. instead of drawing from swashbucklers and seralgios, it draws from Bonnie and Clyde and cold War thrillers. you can hear NS's voice in just the way a developed author's voice should come through. like a new conversation with an old friend.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Matthew
- 11-16-24
Good setup for a new series
It reads like an interesting prequel to a series with a lot of potential. The novel is basically setting the backstory for Dawn/Aurora, who will be the protagonist for the rest of the series. Overall, it is an interesting read, but on its own, not especially compelling. But I look forward to reading the rest of the series.
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- Richard
- 11-26-24
Another wonderful story from Neal Stephenson
I really enjoyed this book - though not science fiction, which I love, it has the patented Neal Stephenson attention to detail that is so much fun.
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