another kind of cold war

[sergebroom]

I’ve been feeling left a bit hungry by the last couple issues of Asimov’s. I’m not sure why. It’s probably just me. Anyway. The September issue did contain Stephen Baxter’s short story The Ice War. To be honest, it took me quite a few years before I could forgive him for the novel Moonseed, probably the first and so far only book I’ve ever wanted to throw at a wall by the time I reached the last page. Mind you, there have been other books that I’d have wanted to do that to, except that I had stopped reading before The End. Not finishing a book is something that I once upon a time considered unthinkable. Welllll…There was Delany’s Dhalgren, but, aside from it, my habit was to read a book to the bitter end. Then I bagena began the fourth decade of my life, and I decided that life was too short to spend on storie s that weren’t giving me any pleasure. Of course, my definition of literary pleasure isn’t limited to…

(“Serge! Psttt!”)
What?
(“The Baxter story?”)
But I digress.

The year is 1720, and Europe is in the grip of the Little Ice Age. One night, Jack Hobbes, on the run from a farmer whose daughter he got with child, is witness to the invasion of Great Britain as debris from a comet fall upon the countryside, and from the debris crabs of ice are spawned. Before long he rescues Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, who, with a very old Isaac Newton, are on a mission from the King to fond a way to stop the monsters and their Queen, “…a quarter of a mile tall, with acolytes monstrous in themselves acutting around the ground at her feet…” Newton gets the people of Newcastle to dig a giant trench that, when it is set on fire, might stop the alien invaders.

And even now ice eggs were landing behind the line of the vallum. They were met with boots and spades and thrown into the fire. Here and there, however, ice crabs emerged, their lenticular bodies sliding up their temples of limbs; we knew from experience that before the night was done such seedlings would grow into mighty trees of ice and Electrick, and we smashed and stamped them down. But many eggs sailed over our heads into the dark, and I knew we could not get them all, and that new monsters were already birthing in the dark behind us.

I liked the story quite a bit, in spite of a cheat in the drama that is very dissimilar to that of Moonseed, come to think of it. One reason why The Ice War didn't become catapult fodder is that, here, the cheat didn’t come after a few hundred pages. Also, its image of a War of the Worlds pitting humans against icy cousins of the Martian tripods is quite awesome.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

'Then I bagena the fourth decade of my life...' In an alternate Quebec, settled by Italians, amico Sergio?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Curses!

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

It sounds like the premise for an interesting novel.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Well, in the 1970s, one Quebec singer had a very popular song about what if Canada's discoverer had sailed to the south instead of the north, and he goes on about how that version Quebec would become associated with palm trees instead of pine trees.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I didn't like The Ice War, but I'm not usually very fond of alternate history. I liked several in the Oct/Nov Asimov's, most especially Reed's.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I'm still going thru the Oct/Nov issue. Or trying to, but not because of the fiction. Working 12-hours days every day of a week, two weeks in a row, kind of takes a lot of energy out of a person.