Marcel Theroux in The New York Times:
The popularity of Neal Stephenson’s books is an ongoing riposte to the idea that readers are no longer capable of feats of sustained attention. Intimidatingly long and packed with abstruse information, his novels are cherished for their intellectual breadth, their world-building and their weird prescience: They have anticipated, among other things, the metaverse and cryptocurrency.
“D: Heavy Water” is the second volume in the planned Bomb Light trilogy, a historical epic about the race to make the first atomic bomb. The first volume, “Polostan,” introduced us to Aurora, a young Russian American woman. Recruited by Soviet intelligence, she was tasked toward the end of that novel with seducing a Moscow-based British journalist called Owen Crisp-Upjohn. “D: Heavy Water” takes over the narrative at this point, in 1934, with Owen supplanting Aurora as the story’s protagonist.
More here.
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