Polostan (Bomb Light #1)

by Neal Stephenson

She raised her sights and looked for higher and grander things that related to the theorem, and found them in plain view, rising above the Midway like colossi erected by scientific pharaohs. Save that unlike the monuments of Egypt these were never meant to endure for more than five months. Unburdened of the requirement to survive even a single Chicago winter, the fantasists—“architects” was probably the wrong word—had diverted all resources normally spent on practical considerations to the true purpose. The names blazoned on them in modern sans-serif letters were Ford, General Motors, Westinghouse, Firestone. She knew what the German Communists were thinking and what the people at the kommunalka would say, which was that this only proved that it was all just a propaganda festival for capitalism. Dawn, who had been raised on propaganda, saw that this was not the entire truth. One could easily imagine going to a party congress in the Soviet Union or a rally in Germany and finding the same buildings celebrating the same things, only the typefaces changed. As much as they might like to believe that they were competing with one another, all were a conjoined program for the theorem.