20 Great Books to Read Over the Holidays
Corporate rivalries, capers—and a captivating presidential biography. ‘Some people still wanted a hagiography. Some people wanted a hit job.’
One of Neal Stephenson’s favorite texting buddies is Seamus Blackley, a creator of the Xbox when he was at Microsoft and a former agent at Creative Artists Agency. Their friendship extends back years, and they often trade notes and thoughts on whatever technology has come to fascinate them.
A while ago, they got to talking about radiation and nuclear power, and they settled on a challenge: They’d each build a cloud chamber, a device initially developed during the last century to observe atoms using gas, condensation and photography. Stephenson was happy with his—up to a point. “Seamus’ was much better,” he recalled with a laugh: In Blackley’s cloud chamber, the atoms were much more visible. “His had a crazy amount of activity going on.”
Their hobbyist project formed part of the research Stephenson labored over for his latest book, “Polostan,” which he intends as the first in a trilogy. It marks a departure of sorts for Stephenson, who is most famous for “Snow Crash,” “Cryptonomicon” and other cyberpunk and speculative fiction novels. “Polostan,” by contrast, is first and foremost a spy novel, a tale about Dawn, a young woman who becomes an officer in the USSR’s early police and surveillance agency in the 1930s, wending her way through the shadows cast by the dawn of both the Atomic Age and the Space Age.