Burning the Ice [Hardcover]

Laura J. Mixon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 2002

More than a hundred years after a small band of humans stole an antimatter-fueled starship and headed away at near-lightspeed, a colony of those renegades' descendants are now struggling to survive on Brimstone, a barely-habitable world of ice and bitter cold four dozen light-years from Earth.

In the long run, they hope to slowly terraform Brimstone, making it, if not Earthlike, at least bearable. In the short run-well, life is hard, and everyone lives in everyone else's laps. Not easy for anyone. Particularly hard if, like Manda, you just aren't cut out to get along with others in conditions of constant crowding and zero privacy.

Most people wouldn't be eager to get away from the main colony and work on a scientific project in the howling frozen wastes. For Manda, it's a deliverance. But news of the intelligent life she discovers in Brimstone's depths will change everything-if she can bring the news back to her fellows alive. For, it turns out, there are political plots and counterplots still active in the colony, dangerous twists tracing back to Earth itself...and outward to the stars.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Like everyone else in the tiny, struggling human colony on the isolated ice planet Brimstone, Manda is a clone--yet she is unique, and outcast, because she's a singleton. All the colonists are twins or triplets--and so is Manda, but her twin brother died at birth. Alien to her own kind, Manda prefers to work alone, exploring the sea bottoms with remote equipment. When she discovers evidence of intelligent alien life in the sea, she isn't surprised that her finding creates discord in the colony, which is on the verge of terraforming Brimstone. But she doesn't expect her surveillance of the aliens to be mysteriously cut off, she doesn't expect to fall in love, and she never dreams that the supposedly long-gone starship that placed the colonists on Brimstone might be monitoring all communications, and its crew carrying out their own malign, decades-old designs on both the colonists and natives. --Cynthia Ward

From Publishers Weekly

In this gripping and ingenious SF novel, Mixon (Astro Pilots) takes us some two centuries from now to Brimstone, a planet many light-years from Earth and settled by clones from the starship Exodus, who are trying to terraform the ice-covered world. In the forefront of this effort is Manda, a singleton (one whose cloned twin is dead), restless, inquiring and by local standards something of a sociopath. Enter a rockfall that kills the rest of her siblings and threatens to wipe out the colony from starvation. Also enter one Jim LuisMichael, friend, ally, lover and fellow explorer of the remote reaches of Brimstone. There Jim and Manda discover intelligent alien life, in the form of a gigantic organic computer, as well as a deadly plot against both the aliens and Brimstone by the remaining Exodus crew members. To keep the terraforming going, the "croche-born" in space are prepared to destroy the aliens, whom Jim and Manda foil at nearly the cost of their own lives. Then only a split in the croche-born's ranks and the heroic resistance of the colonists keep the croche-born from winning an outright war. While hardly short of action or fascinating scenes of alien contact, the novel's real strength lies in the author's depiction of the future society, with its complex system of degrees of kinship, social obligations and controls, sexual mores and even appropriate pronouns. The ending may be a little rushed, but the vivid storytelling and a high level of imagination mark this as perhaps Mixon's best work to date.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (August 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312869037
• ISBN-13: 978-0312869038
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,732,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good story, June 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Burning the Ice (Hardcover)

Very high class space opera. :-)
A few things stretched my boundaries of believability, like the idea that a hugely expensive interstellar ship would be put in the hands of some clearly psychopathic creche children. That part was like Anne McCaffrey's "The Ship that Sang" gone horribly wrong. But it was pretty clear from the beginning that these creche children were crazy as loons. I just couldn't see that happening.

There were a few science things here and there, but it was mostly an excellent story, with an interesting alien.

A few tweaky things, like a colony filled with cloned chemists who couldn't get any base stock for food production out of an oil refinery. The refinery wasn't explained either, nor the source of the oil on this nearly lifeless icebound planet.

There was an odd bit about the colonists needing to hold back on terraforming, raising the planet's temperature. If the alien is 5 kilometers down, living on undersea lavaflows and vents that raise water temp to 200 degrees C, how is it going to be harmed by raising the surface temperature?

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, thoughtful sf thriller, April 22, 2005

By 

Elisabeth Carey (Lawrence, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Burning the Ice (Hardcover)

Clones, colonization, love, death, alien intelligences, artificial intelligence, a twisted take on how well encasing human beings and forcing them to interact with the world solely through computers and telepresence, à la McCaffrey's Brains, would really turn out-this book has it all.

Oh, and it's fun, too.

Manda CarliPablo is part of a human colony attempting to terraform a moon of a gas giant in a system with no more immediately habitable planets. The colonists are all clones derived from the people who controlled the ship that dropped them on this world, people referred to as the crèche-born, who were then going to leave the system for the next one on the list. Manda is currently the youngest of the CarliPablo group-and the only singleton in the colony. Everyone else has vatmates, giving them twins, triplets, or even quadruplets. Manda's twin, though, died in the vat before they were decanted. This makes her a little strange and somewhat at odds even with the rest of her own clone. With the rest of the colony, it's even worse.

Howver, Manda has managed to find, for the moment, satisfying work that doesn't require her to do what she does badly-cooperate with others. She's exploring the oceans of their semi-frozen world by telepresence-operated waldoes, looking for heat vents that might be favorable spots for the native life, mostly microbes, that they know at least did exist there in the past. This doesn't conflict with her own clone's favored project of mining the methane ice, and it's potentially beneficial to the colony, so she's left alone to do it.

And then, more or less simultaneously, she causes a major social embarrassment for her clone, a accidental meeting with a man from another clone, Jim LuisMichael, leads to some cooperation and a lead on a likely vent, she loses contact with the waldo in the best position to explore it, and a cave-in causes death, devastation, and loss of resources for the colony. Oh, and the colony's oldest and most sophisticated AI tells her that the crèche-born are still around.

There are a lot of secrets in this colony, and secrets within secrets, and even the AI has a conflict of interest. It's intricate and well-done, and keeps getting better all the way through.

Recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mysteries above and below, May 17, 2003

By 

J. Bowman "Bookworm" (Fresno, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Burning the Ice (Hardcover)

In a small colony of clones trying to eck out a living on a freezing moon in a distant star system, Mandy, a loner in a very clique-based society, pilots undersea waldoes to explore the world. The syntellect Ur-Carli leads her one day to a frozen room with the corpse of the colony's first leader, Carli, along with a telescope, console, and more, informing her that the ship carrying the crèche-born is still in orbit, not gone as everyone thought, and spying on them. Life went on otherwise... until a massive cave-in smashes important systems, disrupts the colony, and kills her sister.

Strange discrepancies start to pop up, like one of Manda's waldos losing contact but still responding to signals, and when she takes proof of the crèche-born's presence to her elder siblings, they summarily erase it, explaining that their presence has been known but covered up in hopes they would leave. Next she's packing and off to check on that unresponsive waldo, and at the drill site she gets a minute of contact  and a glimpse of native life!  before all is black again. She and Jim, a sonar specialist she rapidly becomes close to, suspect outside interference.

Now she wants to take a trip down for herself, in an old underwater vessel. From a pariah she becomes a hero, inspiring hope in the wake of tragedy. Under the ice Manda and Jim find that the crèche-born's control is much greater and more dangerous than they ever believed. Manda has to get back to warn the others, but even if that is possible, will it be in time?

It does take a while to get moving; the first hundred pages are mostly angsty exposition and overexploration of the culture. In many ways it reselmbles a society based entirely on a high-school social culture, full of cliques, grudges, "coup" (owed favors, particularly political) that forms a barter system and family power, and petty jealousies. Manda is very excluded, and perhaps Mixon spends too much time showing us just how much. But the emotional troubles are real, painful to read, and after the cave-in and death she and her family seem more real. Though often at odds, they are all painted sympathetically, not an easy task. Family loyalty is a recurring theme; it may not be the strongest bond, but it is the most permanent. I didn't get quite enough sense of how old everyone was, though, not until near the end.

Once the story does pick up, it takes off and never lets up. Throughout the explorations and ruminations is a strong undercurrent of confusion, distress, and haste, never settling into idleness. The feelings for Jim aren't as throughly explored, just because everyone's distracted by too much going on in the meantime. All of the people seem credible, each with their own faults and distictions and hearts. Even the schizophrentic crèche-born. Many things just plain don't make sense for a while, but all is slowly revealed, settling down to a satisfying conclusion. I highly recommend.

This is a sequel to Proxies, but I'd have never known. I didn't need to read it to understand the story. This could possibly be mined for a sequel, years down the line (dealing with renewed contact from Earth, and the alien?), but anything sooner would be a stretch. I for one look forward to any effort in this direction.