My review of Neal Stephenson’s Polostan is up at PopMatters:

As the first volume of a projected trilogy, Polostan avoids the tendency of such books to serve as a crowded place setting for everything to come. Rather than spreading his narrative across a half-dozen main characters that he spends the next two books stitching together, Stephenson packs everything readers might want in their characters into one woman and lets her run with it. (Given Stephenson’s tendency for thousand-pagers, one wonders if he wrote this whole thing as one book and the publisher argued him into chopping it up)…