Ice & Iron

A new ice age has begun, with a group of scientists and others are scattered at the leading edge plotting the movement of the ice sheet. As they do this, they begin to find artifacts and bodies that are from an environment that is not one of ice and cold. One of the scientists plots the finds on a map of estimated landscape features of a future after the ice age. This leads him to believe that they are coming from the future.
A slow moving book, but it was a compeling read. As my first Wilson Tucker book it has inspired me to read more.

This is probably one of the worse books I ever read. Normally I put the book down when they are this bad, but I didn't think it could get any worse. I was wrong

Cover by Laszlo Kubinyi. If there are interior illustrations, edit book description.

I’ve read a few of Wilson Tucker’s books, and this is my favourite of them, although it’s a short and slight novel, less ambitious than the others.

Published in 1974, it imagines a not-too-distant future suffering from a new ice age, with glaciers overrunning Canada and threatening the northern United States—which is quaintly amusing, as it’s the reverse of what’s actually happening.

A team of investigators in the very cold zone near the advancing glaciers finds strange objects and human corpses falling intermittently out of thin air, and eventually works out where they must be coming from and why.

What I like about the book:

1. The gradual unfolding and solution of the mystery.

2. The rather unusual and offbeat writing style and show more characters (in particular the protagonist).

3. The ingenious use of a few elements of past history, woven into this speculative future.

Nothing special happens at the end of the story: it just ends quietly as the mystery is solved (in outline) and the team disperses. But, in the context of this story, I think the ending is satisfactory, and a more exciting finale would seem out of place.

The story is implausible in various ways (not just the ice age!), but I don’t find that a problem. Just think of it as a quirky fantasy, and press on.

However, the short penultimate chapter is implausible in terms of human behaviour: it seems to show primitive hunter-gatherers behaving in a way that they wouldn’t. I don’t see the point of this chapter: it contributes nothing useful to the book, and could be omitted. show less