Customer Reviews

Ice and Iron (Arrow science fiction)

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This book, written in 1973, is an interesting time capsule. At the time, scientists were telling us that a new ice age was coming instead of global warming. This novel runs with that idea. Set sometime in the near future, ice sheets are growing to encompass the world. The sheets have already spread over most of Canada, making it uninhabitable. Cavemen and debris have begun to fall from the sky near the edge of the ice fall and Fisher Highsmith is sent to investigate.

This fun, simple, quick-to-read book entertained me for an afternoon. The chapters alternate between the "Ice" period that is set in the near-future and the "Iron" period set in the far future where man has returned to primitive Iron-age living.

The most interesting aspect of this book was the subtext of ignoring consequences of weapon use. In the future, advanced civilization has created a gun that appears to vaporize its targets. In reality, the gun pushes the targets into the past. The users of the weapon have no idea of the far-reaching consequences of the technology. The guns seem to work and that's good enough. Certainly if we would invent a weapon that worked although we couldn't exactly explain how, it seems likely we would still deploy it. Definitely food for thought.

A nice little SF novel, with geology/meteorology/earth science as the 'S' value. The next Ice Age, the warming after that, and a novel weapon-gadget that explains Charles Fort's rains of fishes, frogs, etc. Old-fashioned, as SF reads: a puzzle to solve, no characters to develop, admire the coolness of the conceit and then move on. Things that make it feel especially dated: no computers, telefacsimile is the state of the art in information transfer (this a couple hundred years into the future, mind), and the whole idea of "climate change" meaning glaciation not global warming. The all-woman military of the far future may have seemed far-out radical in 1973, less shocking now.

Harmless, but not much better than that. It took me 30 years to get around to reading it, and I wasn't missing anything in that time