I guerrieri nel ghiaccio

by Wilson Tucker, Beata della Frattina (translator)

La nuova glaciazione ha sepolto il Canadà e scende anno dopo anno negli Stati Uniti. Lungo l'implacabile muraglia bianca, a temperature di 60 gradi sotto zero, alcune piccole stazioni governative raccolgono dati scientifici sulla grande devastazione. Fisher Yann Highsmith è appunto uno di questi scienziati, ma il suo settore ha un altro problema, oltre a quello del ghiaccio: dall'alto, o così sembra, piovono mattoni di tipo mesopotamico, archi e frecce, coltelli, cadaveri di guerrieri barbuti e seminudi. Sono indizi di una civiltà primitiva e di un clima temperato che non possono esistere in quello scenario artico. Ma allora, da dove vengono i guerrieri? Dal futuro? Dal passato? Poi una pattuglia avverte Highsmith che è stato trovato il guerriero n. 17. Vivo.

Copertina di Karel Thole

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Time Travel, Science Fiction Fantasy

154 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Arthur Wilson "Bob" Tucker was an American mystery, action adventure, and science fiction writer, who wrote as Wilson Tucker.

He was also a prominent member of science fiction fandom, who wrote extensively for fanzines under the name Bob Tucker, a family nickname bestowed in childhood.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ice and Iron was published by Doubleday in 1974 and was a main selection of The Science Fiction Book Club (which was a big deal back then) and then was released in mass market paperback format late in 1975 by Ballantine (before they became Del Rey) with a slightly different title (Ice & Iron, the version I read) and with a completely different ending. It's a fast-paced, fascinating book about a man investigating dramatic climate change, Fisher Highsmith, who encounters a strange mystery; naked cavemen falling out of the sky. Highsmith is portrayed as an amusing, charming, roguish individual (remember it was 1974), but would probably now be seen as despicably sexist. Tucker incorporates elements of suspense, Fortean speculation (Charles Fort never mentioned wombats, as Tucker's pal Buck Coulson taught us...but never mind), and interesting scientific ideas involving anthropology, climatology, and geology. It's an overlooked near classic with vastly different alternating viewpoint chapters that seem equally valid. Tucker was a very good writer who fell somewhat into disfavor with age, but his works shouldn't be forgotten; this was one of his best.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thin book, quick read. Aspects of time travel (Mesopotamian bricks?) and climate change and gynarchy; I really liked the alternating chapters. Some chapters mention the events of other chapters but from a different perspective - I've always been a sucker for that. Also, the main character (Fisher) is quite humorous at times.

Drawbacks - the story ends somewhat abruptly, with no real resolution.

Bonus - the supporting character who mentions the research of Charles Fort. More well known today than in the early seventies, and my favorite phenomenologist. I definitely enjoy Wilson Tucker's writing style and will seek out more in the near future.

[Tex-49 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanzo interessante e di piacevole lettura, ma ci sono vari punti non spiegati ed il finale lascia un po' di amaro.

[Sol · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn't a complete waste of time, but it came close. It felt like a short story premise stretched to novel length, and despite that it didn't even manage to explore its subjects that deeply.

Set in a near future where the onset of a new ice age has pushed the northern population to the southern US and Mexico, it follows a group of scientists near the edge of the ice sheet investigating the strange appearances of random organic matter, primitive tools and naked human bodies. Alternating chapters follow primitive humans living near a retreating ice sheet in the same area. The protagonist, Fisher Highsmith, theorizes the bodies are coming from the future, from a population thousands of years in the future, after the current glaciation.

I'm always down for cavemen, but this book just could not pull itself together. The "present" chapters are generally okay, but they read like the author just wanted to show off his reading on glacier geology and tie it in to something he read in Ripley's Believe It or Not!. Granted, my high school geography class had a whole unit about glaciers, so most of this was already familiar to me. Highsmith never has to deal with any setbacks or make significant alterations to his theory, and it just keeps getting confirmed. There are some amusing incidents but nothing particularly interesting. The introduction of time travel subjects who don't die on the way is hardly explored at all, before the book just ends. Highsmith's sole hollow accomplishment is the confirmation of his theory. He doesn't even convince the doctor to go on vacation with him, and sure as hell doesn't get the girl. Maybe fitting in a book about the inevitable onslaught of a glacier, but it feels like a waste of time, and I didn't care about him or them at any point.

The caveman chapters are kind of interesting in concept. They're mostly unrelated to the main story except in a few particulars, don't follow a single set of characters, and they don't move through time in a particular direction. The first four are interestingly structured, with the fourth starting before and covering the time period of the first three, the third covering the period of the first two, and the first and second occuring on the same day, but that isn't clear until the later chapters. But they never build up to anything. They're just set dressing to provide a concrete view of what Highsmith is theorizing. And as set dressing, I find them deficient. There's no discernable social structure to the cavemen, who just seem to roam around solitarily, killing and/or raping whoever they encounter. The invading matriarchy is a blackhole of questions. What turned them into a matriarchy? Why did they reimplement monarchy? How did they invent time machine guns? Did they forget how to make regular guns? How did Spanish crowd out English and not vice versa? Highsmith learns the answers to none of these questions, and neither does the reader.

There are two endings to this novel. In the 1974 edition 18 is dead, while in the 1975 edition she is not, and she confronts and kills 17. Afterward, the endings play out the same way. I would say the 1975 ending is slightly better.

Fun fact: the author coined the term "space opera".

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book many (many) years ago - partly due to the cover being from of the artists I collect care of the Paper Tiger series (see Parallel lines). However I think it was so long ago the records never got to Goodreads so I thought it was time to fire it up again and give it a go.

The story posses a lot of questions (which I am not sure if they answer properly or not) but rather a case of looking at the fall out from posing a "what if.." question.

What I am trying and probably badly saying is - is if a question was posed what would the results be and the story explores the results of those results (rather than the original question). So a clever book I am pleased to have revisited - now I have to process it.

[Jonathan Palfrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 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.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was good, but not as good as it could have been. The story moved extremely slowly at first and then picked up near the end. Nothing was really resolved, so the whole impact was of a not very interesting mystery, solved in a relatively uninteresting fashion, while no one falls in love. The characters were pretty well written, although the dialogue had some odd tics. I wasn't sure if the author was intending that the future North Americans dealing with the impending ice age just had a different vernacular to our own, but it was an inefficient and disconcerting way to write dialogue that made the characters seem less real. However, the idea of a new ice sheet grinding south over Canada is a fantastic premise and I would like to read more sci fi set in such a world.

[Bill Plott · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has been many years since I read a Wilson Tucker novel, one of my favorite authors in teenage science fiction years. This one is set at a time in the future when a new Ice Age has brought glaciers that have buried Canada and are creeping across the border into the northern tier of U.S. states. A team of scientists measuring the glide of the glacier is perplexed by bodies and debris that seemingly fall from the sky for no apparent reason or source. The bodies appear to be primitive people. Drawing from the research of Charles Fort, chronicler of the unexplained for many years, we get a tale of apparently parallel universes. It was an engaging enough story, but did not hold me like some of Tucker's other works such as The Year of the Quiet Sun.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Men in the far future develop a technological weapon that entirely eliminates the body. Bodies vanish with no energy shed like they were burned. The weapon actually shifts the mass to another point in the universe, into the past, so there is no loss of energy to the whole universe. While the technology is exotic the culture is primitive and uses the weapon with no thought to its consequences because they do not understand the concept of thermodynamics or the conservation of energy.

In the story's past, our (1973) near future, Earth has entered a new ice age. Scientists researching the leading edge of the glacier are finding the field of debris the weapon is leaving.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An intriguing idea, mixing Fortean events with hard science. The problem with Ice and Iron is that the sub plot involving the protagonist and a fellow scientist gets in the way of the story at inopportune moments. The novel is peopled with odd characters who never really connect with the overarching plot. I was disappointed that Tucker never really gives us insight into the world of the future he depicts. Then there's that ending, or, should I say, lack of one. I liked the book, but it could have been so much better.

[Devero · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanzo strano, con molto non spiegato e poco credibile (nel senso che la sospensione dell'incredulità non riesce ad attivarsi più di tanto) ma con dei punti di forza nella scorrevolezza della storia e nell'atmosfera. Due stelle e mezza abbondanti.

[Marsha Valance · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Earth copes with a new Ice Age, a team of research scientists are bombarded with artifacts from another civilization. A Science Fiction Book Club selection.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a quick read, an intriguing tale, a few issues with the writing but those are probably personal. It's unique, enjoyable.

[Peter R · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting story but no real ending.

[Guillaume · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deux histoires autour du temps, la première est plus intéressante

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been doing GoodReads reviews on both ends, covering books as they're finished and working from lists of books completed that have been maintained since 1974, occasionally going back even further from memory and in reference to a bibliographical cardfile maintained since 1970/71 or so. So doing, I began by favoring serious literature and non-fiction books. I have recently tried to include more science fiction novels and collections as they constitute so very much of the reading actually performed, particularly during breaks from school and during childhood. It is sobering to see how many hundreds, thousands of these things I read, sometimes more than one being consumed in a day, and how little I remember of most of them. There are, thank heavens, a few exceptions, but not many.

Tucker's Ice and Iron is not an exception. Seeing the cover of the book club edition I read brings it back, but only vaguely, as a novel enjoyed during the hours of its consumption.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

The time might well be today in this intriguing science fiction tale in which the vagaries of weather open the door to an unknown civilization from the past - or is it the future? Across the globe a new ice age is encroaching. From Alberta to Ontario most of Canada is deserted, its people resettled in the southern United States and Mexico, while mile by mile, century by century, the glacier grinds down their former homes. Fisher Yann Highsmith is a scientist stationed, with a few colleagues, on the edge of the ice field, recording its relentless growth and the destruction of life in its path. In the midst of this barren landscape the team recovers a weird assortment of artifacts that seem to appear suddenly out of thin air, and Highsmith fits them together into a fantastic theory of another dimension. Then the search parties begin to find bodies out of time and place and Highsmith's history of parallel worlds becomes a chilling reality.

[Conan Tigard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found my opinion changing greatly during the reading of Iron & Ice. At first I really liked the chapters revolving around Fisherman. And I found myself struggling through the chapters in the far future with the primitive people. By the end of the book, I was looking more forward to the far future chapters as only they could explain why these objects were falling. The change came because I guess that I found Fisherman to be pretty obstinate in his opinion and not open at all to other possibilities. To me, he isn't a very good scientist.

Overall, I found Iron & Ice to be pretty good, but I never formed any link to any of the main characters. The scenario the Wilson Tucker has created is interesting and could happen someday. After all, someday the ice will return and cover part of the United States. Where will man go and what will happen? Who can say?

Mr. Tucker gives us a glimpse into his version of the distant future right here on Earth.

I rated this book a 6 out of 10.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books mixes SF and fantasy well. A new ice age strikes, and weird things begin to appear suggesting another, parallel universe. The idea is great, the story is not quite as strong as the idea. But together they work pretty well.

[Henry · Rating 1 out of 5]

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

[A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Silly little book. Almost awesome. It was missing something, I'm not sure exactly what. Enjoyable but not worth much comment.

[Fredrick Danysh]

A new ice age has encompassed the world. Stationed at the edge of the southward moving glacier scientists observe the decline of human culture as the ice creeps southward.

[SciFiOne · Rating 4 out of 5]

1987 grade B-

Hardcover

[Matylda Hiršová · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Já jsem si přišel hrát s kamením"

[Clay · Rating 5 out of 5]

1

[Cheryl]

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