Polostan

The first novel in a new series

Polostan releases today. This is a project that has been in the works for over ten years. My science fiction novels have tended to garner more attention than The Baroque Cycle, my foray into historical fiction writing from about twenty years ago. But even the stuff that’s branded as SF tends to contain a lot of history. Snow Crash had connections back to ancient Sumerian mythology. The Diamond Age was set in the future, but in order to write it I had to do a lot of reading about the culture of the Victorians. Cryptonomicon is really two novels interleaved: one’s a science-fictional techno-thriller, the other is a historical novel set during the Second World War. Anathem is set in another universe with strong historial resonances—you can’t really tell if you’re reading about the distant future or the distant past. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. explicitly sends its characters into historical settings.

Writing The Baroque Cycle left me hungry for more in that vein. After I shipped it, I was always thinking about writing another historical series. In 2013 or so, Seamus Blackley made me aware of some interesting history related to the precursors of the atomic bomb project in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He’s been pursuing his own work on this topic, which I’ll talk about here whenever he’s ready. He and I have been exchanging notes all along. Polostan is dedicated to Seamus. Anyway, once I went down that rabbit hole and began tracing the historical storylines backward and forward in time, it became clear to me that I’d found subject matter that could keep me happily employed for a while, writing a series of comparable scope to The Baroque Cycle. Like The Baroque Cycle, it all pivots around developments in science during an era when science was changing everything, and like The Baroque Cycle it provides all kinds of opportunities to explore connections between scientists and people who live in the worlds of commerce, politics, and the military.

The name of the overall series is Bomb Light. In discussing the project with my agent Liz Darhansoff and my editor Jen Brehl, we considered the same questions that had arisen with the Baroque Cycle: is it better to wait until the whole series is written before publishing the first volume, or bring them out as they’re completed? Should the component novels be bundled together into a smaller number of volumes? The Baroque Cycle really consists of eight component novels, each of fairly typical novel-length (300-ish pages), packaged as three volumes. In that case we waited until the final book existed, at least in first draft form, before pulling the trigger on publishing the first volume. Then we brought out all three volumes in the course of about a year.

While we were considering such matters, other ideas came into my head and we made a collective decision to back-burner Bomb Light so I could work on some other projects, including Seveneves and Termination Shock. I’m confident that the overall Bomb Light series is going to end up being much stronger because of this slow and steady approach, which placed a lot of demands on my publisher’s trust and patience. As far as the series format is concerned, we made a decision last year to bring it out one normal-sized book at a time, and to configure it in such a way that each volume will focus on one of the main characters. Today’s review in the New York Times highlights the pros and cons of that approach: Polostan is a good read that, if you enjoy it, will make you wish that the subsequent volumes were already available. There is, of course, no perfect way around that problem when publishing a series!

Much of the next volume is already written, and when the dust settles from the book tour, which begins today in Seattle, I look forward to turning my attention to finishing it.