Polostan

Stephenson (Termination Shock) is a towering talent whose discursive writing style meshes smoothly with the complexity of this plot and its characters. A winner of literary awards for speculative fiction, he depicts real life with details right out of the tomes of history and science. His first volume of “Bomb Light,” a new series about the coming of the Atomic Age, introduces Dawn, a.k.a. Aurora, a smart, spunky teenager whose perils-of-Pauline life places her alongside the icons of early 20th-century history: Bolsheviks in Russia, Bonus Marchers in Washington, and physicists at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. She plays polo, as taught by her cowboy anarchist cousins in Montana, assembles a tommy gun to help her Leninist dad in Leningrad, and survives water torture in Siberia. Fair means or foul, she’s a survivor ready for the next installment of Stephenson’s exciting new series.