Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. This is my second conversation with Neal Stephenson, who needs no introduction, but do let me tell you about Neal's new book, Polostan, which I read an advanced copy of. It's a very different kind of book. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I very much liked it. And the real test of this is when the book ends, are you sad that it wasn't longer? And I was sad it wasn't longer, and I will be pre-ordering parts two, three, and whatever else comes. Neal, welcome.
How is it that you think about why you sometimes switch from showing us the future to illustrating the past?
You know, for me it's a continuum. All of my science fictiony books have had callbacks to historical themes, some more than others. And so to me, I've always enjoyed history. I've had the opportunity to write historical fiction. I've greatly enjoyed it. And so it's been a while since I went there, and I was very... it was like going home almost, you know, being able to go back and work in a historical setting again.
Sometimes I think that when the present and future are changing most rapidly, that's when we need to write about the past, that it's easier to speculate about the future when nothing's happening.
Well, it's interesting. I mean, we're in a weird situation now where I think that people's formal education in history is probably at an all-time low, and yet there are all of the new ways of learning about history that didn't exist, you know, 50 years ago. There's podcasts and YouTube videos and so on that you can sink your teeth into if you decide that you're interested in some particular era of history. So I think that more and more what we have now is kind of autodidacts out there who've, you know, who sort of on their own time, not at school, but during their leisure time, have decided to become history geeks.
Why is this book called Polostan?
You know, the name is explained toward the very end of the book. There's a funny thing about book titles today, which is that they need to be searchable, they need to be uniquely searchable. So I've had the experience a few times in the last decade or two of proposing a title for a book and the publisher coming back saying, that's an awesome title, you know, we'd love to use it, but it's not going to work when people begin typing it into a search engine. So now the trend is towards finding things that'll autocomplete pretty quickly. And so Polostan is a word that emerges, it's sort of a joke that one of the characters makes toward the end of the book, but it's a reference to the fact that the sport of polo enters into the storyline in a few different contexts.
How many spies do you think psychologically are just totally screwed up? Are all of them screwed up, or can you be a normal spy the way you might be a normal grocer?
I think that I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information. It's just not a natural way for people to live. So from what I can tell, looking at kind of espionage in the era of, say, the Second World War, the best spies were completely unexceptional people, and that's probably still true today. But you don't want James Bond, you know, you don't want a femme fatale kind of character who's going to stand out. You want somebody who just disappears into the background. So that's the kind of people that they like to recruit.
And you want psychological compartmentalization. People express emotion.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that it's easiest when you don't have to lie, you know, when the role that you're playing is reasonably close to who you really are. And I guess unless you're a total sociopath...
Spies might be total sociopaths, right? There's some reasonable percentage of sociopaths out there, and you're going to do something. Is a sociopath maybe a spy?
Yeah, yeah, maybe. I don't know if there's a Myers-Briggs category for that, but maybe that's what they look for. I heard a story once that there was a phase, I don't know if it was in the 70s or 80s, where there had been some leaks from compromised people in the American intelligence world, and so they started trying to hire real straight-arrow types, you know, who just had no blemishes or perceived blemishes anywhere on their record that could be used to kind of compromise them or blackmail them. And they ended up with such sort of pure, innocent kind of characters that the Brits started withholding information because they just couldn't stand having to deal with these kind of small-town naive people who were being sent their way by the Americans. Don't know if it's true, but good story.
I'm not saying Mormons are naive, but I'm told the CIA has a disproportionate share of Mormons, which makes sense, right?
Yeah, that's where you would go to look to find such people.
If we run through different counterfactuals, you know, the secrets of the atom bomb, which do of course leak out to the Soviet Union, but how contingent was that? Can you easily imagine a lot of very different futures where we just can that secret for 10 years or more, or do you think it inevitably was just going to happen?
You know, there's some debate as to how important that leakage really was. I mean, at the time it seems like a horrendous failure to have let that information go. But how long would it have taken the Soviets to duplicate that effort, you know, based on sort of available information? I don't think it would have taken a lot longer. Their incentive to build a bomb was too great. And particularly if you're willing to settle for the gun style of a bomb as opposed to the implosion device, you know, that's a pretty simple object.
It could just be they had multiple decent spies. So if we had stopped the ones who carried the secrets, if there were 20 others waiting in the wings, then it's not that contingent at all. Yeah. And how do you think about AI secrets? Do you think those are bound to flow out, or it's contingent?
You mean like code secrets or proprietary software that's in AI systems?
Or some people would say it's the weights, the data, different opinions as to what the secrets are, but there's something in there that not everyone has.
Well, yeah, I mean, the way you get those weights is by running these big training sessions, right, that are incredibly expensive. And so I haven't actually thought about it before, but yeah, I would imagine that if you've spent billions of dollars to get a set of weights, that you're going to try to hang on to that.
How effectively could you stage your own death? You really want to do it, and you're willing to fake it, but everyone thinks it's real. I read about it in the papers, Neal is gone. I nod my head, I weep, and then I forget about it. I don't mean I forget about you, but you understand what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah. Boy, there's not that many circumstances under which all physical traces of someone can be obliterated. I mean, that's a fairly hard thing to do because, you know, it would have been easier 100 years ago, but we've got cameras everywhere and we've got DNA testing and other ways to prove or to disprove that somebody's actually dead. So, you know, I guess it would have to be something like a plane crash into the ocean.
But then how do you survive it? Oh yeah, okay. I mean, to kill yourself is one thing, but to pretend you've killed yourself and stayed alive seems harder.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could parachute out, you know, if it was like a small plane, like not a jet airliner full of people, but, you know, a single seater. I guess that might work. Hire a private plane, have it crash, parachute out into somewhere. You're witnessed getting into the plane and taking off. Yeah, but then there's no way to recover the evidence for some reason. It's pretty hard to do. I mean, if someone really wanted to, if they were just determined to go and find the... like, you see the efforts that people have gone to to go down to the Titanic, you know. Well, I mean, if you can go find that thing and check it out with a submarine, then it's pretty hard to really find a place that can't be accessed in that way.
Do you still write your novels in longhand on legal pads?
Not on legal pads, but I do write them in longhand. Yeah, yeah. I buy this fancy paper from Italy. I mean, I kind of had this idea that if I bought fancy paper, you know, I'd use less of it, I'd be more kind of conservative. And I don't think that worked, because even fancy paper doesn't cost very much. I like opening the package too much. It comes in a nice package with like wax, the wax seal on it.
So how does longhand improve your thinking or writing process compared to, say, typing?
Well, I can type really fast, so it's easy to just, you know, keyboard goes brr kind of thing where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head, and that's not necessarily a good thing. It's valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while because it's really easy to improve it or even just to get rid of it while it's between your ears. But as soon as you put it down on the screen, even though it is editable and all that, it takes on a kind of permanence. It requires more effort to go back and fix it. So I think that the first draft quality is better. And it's also just fast to edit on paper. You know, I can just like draw a box around a paragraph and put a big X through it, or cross out a word, or write something in. And it just takes longer to do all of those things if you're screwing around with a mouse or whatever.
Now, you must have spent a lot of time thinking about communism over the last few years. Why is it, in your view, having come to grips with the topic, that so many American intellectuals became infatuated with Stalinism, and not just agnostic, but positively enthusiastic? This often survived their visits to the Soviet Union. How did that happen? Are we just, as humans, deranged beings?
I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the main character in Polostan is the daughter of a Russian dad and an American woman who were both very involved in leftist politics in the late teens, early 20s. And so there were a lot of, not just Americans, but Westerners in general, who went to the Soviet Union in those years because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great. And this was obviously before Stalinism and all that. But even then, there was all kinds of bad stuff going on. The precursor of the KGB was coming into power and doing bad things. And if you had the eyes to see it, you could see that this was going in a bad direction. But a lot of those people did not want to see the bad side of things and kind of closed their eyes to it. So there's a great book by Malcolm Muggeridge called, I think it's called Moscow in Winter, which he wrote in, I think, 1933. But it's sort of, it's fictionalized, but it's clearly, it's a thinly veiled account of these kinds of people in Moscow in the early 30s. And Muggeridge has been there and he knows bad things are happening. He knows about the famine, the man-made famine in Ukraine, probably knows about a lot of other things. And he's depicting these Western expats who just, they refuse to acknowledge any downside to the revolution. So there's plenty of stories like that from that era. And I don't know if it means that we're deranged. I think we want to see nice things happen in the world. And if we've decided that there's a particular political movement or ideology that's going to make nice things happen, then it's a little too easy for us to deceive ourselves about the downside of such movements.
And what is it about the Soviet Union that you have ended up most admiring? Most admiring, most admiring, right? Because you've spent a lot of time studying it, reading about it, thinking about it.
Well, they make really good rockets. So if you're in the rocket business, their ability to make high-performing rocket engines and so on is pretty astounding. But the amazing thing that they did in the 30s, which is the period I'm focusing on, was to kind of yank this backward country forward from the 19th century into the 20th century by building this huge industrial base at breakneck speed. And in the course of doing that, they did a lot of terrible things. So when I say that it's admirable, I'm just referring to kind of, oh, look, they built a big steel mill, and I'm not taking into account the body count.
It strikes me that it was a reasonably favorable environment for enabling strong women, and I'm not sure exactly why, but I do see that in the data.
Yeah, so they were pretty serious about equal rights for women. And so I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists thought it was a great place, because there really were a lot of women getting better education, becoming doctors, getting roles in the military. You know, it was easier to get things like abortions or to get a divorce. So they did kind of put their money where their mouth was as far as women's rights was concerned.
And to get into the headspace or the feel of writing about the Soviet Union of that time, are there specific things you do? You put on Prokofiev or you open Doctor Zhivago, or what? How does that work for you, or you just do it?
I like to find first-person accounts. I like to look at pictures, the iconography of the Soviet Union. You know, there are various people who went there in the 20s and 30s and wrote memoirs, Americans, you know, who wrote memoirs describing their experiences there. And because they were written at the time, kind of before people knew about Stalinism and, you know, the excesses of Stalinism, it's written without kind of a full premonition of how bad things were going to get. And so in particular, there's an account of a, I'm not going to be able to remember the name right now, but there was an American engineer who went and worked at this huge steel mill at Magnitogorsk in the 30s and helped them build that. And so he's got a memoir telling about just his day-to-day experiences of working with these people, kind of the good and the bad mixed together.
Is there much in Soviet fiction that you admire?
Man, I don't know if I've ever read a single word of Soviet fiction.
Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate. I'm doing a whole podcast on it. That's a great, great novel.
Okay, okay. There's some Soviet science fiction like Strugatsky, which ended up turning into the movie Stalker from Poland.
Stanislav Lem, probably Solaris. He's very good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lem, I think overall, yeah.
Do you think there are other American fiction writers who've succeeded in capturing something of the Soviet experience? So I think of Norman Mailer's Oswald book, which I think is quite good. It's maybe my favorite Norman Mailer, but not many examples.
But I like what you did with it.
Yeah, I was just listening to The Rest Is History podcast about the Kennedy assassination, and they do a segment on Oswald's stint in the Soviet Union, and DeLillo writes about it too. But no, I'm sure it exists, but I'm too poorly read to know about it.
You know, since when I was 19, I visited Gary, Indiana, which of course is now a while ago, it was more up and running than it is now. And ever since then, I had this dream to visit Magnitogorsk. I mean, do you like me also want to go there, or is it just somewhere you want to stay away from, assuming you could go safely, forget about the current war and the like?
