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Iskriget
1940: I Centraleuropa gör tyska och tjeckiska republikaner uppror mot kejsarens diktatur. Rebellspionen Johnny Bornewald skickas till sydpolskontinenten Alba på ett rutinuppdrag. Men han och vägvisaren Linda Connor hamnar i knipa när strider oväntat blossar upp. Polarköld, fientliga kulor och smutsigt maktspel blir tre dödliga hot mot dem. De kommer plötsligt en stor hemlighet på spåren gör den dem till bondeoffer i det stora kriget? Eller hittar Johnny och Linda en väg ut
- GenresSteampunk
196 pages, Staple Bound
First published September 5, 2011
1 person is currently reading
17 people want to read
About the author
Anders Blixt
52 books8 followersAnders Blixt is a middle-aged chap with a lovely family in Stockholm, Sweden. He earns his living as a tech writer and use his spare time to write role-playing games and fantastic stories.
Anders Blixt fell in love with science fiction at the age of eight in 1967, when his father gave his Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with the encouraging words: “I liked this story when I was a kid.” A few years later, he entered JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth thanks to the school library*. And since then he is frequently found trekking through the depths of the Mirkwood or in the arid hills of old-school Mars.
Anders Blixt fell in love with science fiction at the age of eight in 1967, when his father gave his Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with the encouraging words: “I liked this story when I was a kid.” A few years later, he entered JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth thanks to the school library*. And since then he is frequently found trekking through the depths of the Mirkwood or in the arid hills of old-school Mars.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 15, 2021
This is a fun dieselpunk spy novel set in an alternate Antarctica. It follows the adventures of Johnny Bornewald (a Swedish aristocrat turned republican/anti-Russian freedom fighter/spy) and Linda Connor (a working class mechanic/republican spy) who travel across an Antarctica divided between the various European colonial powers--which in this case are Russian, Habsburg Austria, the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, and Juliusburg (which I think is South African, but Blixt doesn't provide a super clear depiction of the politics of this world)--to try and figure out what progress Russia is making with a mining operation. In the process, they get swept up in conflicts between Juliusburg and Russia, with the feared empire of Japan joining the war as an ally of Juliusburg to take out much of the Russian holdings in Antarctica, before turning on the Danes. Against this backdrop, Bornewald and Connor find some advanced Russian discoveries, including minerals and atomic powered devices, like a transuranium bomb (aka, a portable atom bomb). They steal the transuranium bomb from a shot-up and alcoholic Englishman who intended to drop it into a volcano to destroy Russian forces, and they plan to take it back to Bornewald's cloudship to transport back to the Nobel Institute (for which Bornewald works). However, when the Japanese take over a Danish town, Bornewald decides he must use the transuranium bomb to destroy the Japanese military and save other Danish settlements from Japanese conquest.
A couple of things are relatively interesting about this novel (apart from the general fun adventure story). One is that despite Bornewald and Connor being together throughout virtually the entire book, even sleeping in the same room most of the time, there is virtually no romantic element to their relationship. At the end, Bornewald notes that Connor seems strangely feminine despite being in grease-smudged overalls and having a crew cut, but other than that there's no romantic storyline, which I would not expect of a story that throws a man and a woman together for the majority of the time. This is probably the Hollywoodization of my horizon of expectations, but it is simply surprising to have a story where a male and female protagonist are on more or less equal footing and have no apparent desire to be anything more than comrades in the anti-imperial struggle.
The other big thing that strikes me is the somewhat subtle anti-Japanese prejudice in the latter portion of the novel. It's not necessarily racist, but it echoes a lot of the impressions of the Japanese from 1950s and 60s WWII movies. And, to be fair, the Japanese did some incredibly horrible things during their WWII-era conquests in East Asia--but so did many other nations/societies engaged in combat, and they rarely earned the racist antipathy directed at the Japanese. I think this is a pitfall of dieselpunk because it is often set in a time when anti-Japanese racism was rampant, and so it's difficult to recreate the culture of that time without falling into recreating that prejudice. It's similar to how many steampunk works--for all their ostensible progressivism--will subtly recreate the gender norms, binaries, and hierarchies that were deeply imbued in Victorian society. Nonetheless, while I can understand this explanation, the anti-Japanese sentiments are still distasteful.
https://youtu.be/0bkMIjv7Vqo
A couple of things are relatively interesting about this novel (apart from the general fun adventure story). One is that despite Bornewald and Connor being together throughout virtually the entire book, even sleeping in the same room most of the time, there is virtually no romantic element to their relationship. At the end, Bornewald notes that Connor seems strangely feminine despite being in grease-smudged overalls and having a crew cut, but other than that there's no romantic storyline, which I would not expect of a story that throws a man and a woman together for the majority of the time. This is probably the Hollywoodization of my horizon of expectations, but it is simply surprising to have a story where a male and female protagonist are on more or less equal footing and have no apparent desire to be anything more than comrades in the anti-imperial struggle.
The other big thing that strikes me is the somewhat subtle anti-Japanese prejudice in the latter portion of the novel. It's not necessarily racist, but it echoes a lot of the impressions of the Japanese from 1950s and 60s WWII movies. And, to be fair, the Japanese did some incredibly horrible things during their WWII-era conquests in East Asia--but so did many other nations/societies engaged in combat, and they rarely earned the racist antipathy directed at the Japanese. I think this is a pitfall of dieselpunk because it is often set in a time when anti-Japanese racism was rampant, and so it's difficult to recreate the culture of that time without falling into recreating that prejudice. It's similar to how many steampunk works--for all their ostensible progressivism--will subtly recreate the gender norms, binaries, and hierarchies that were deeply imbued in Victorian society. Nonetheless, while I can understand this explanation, the anti-Japanese sentiments are still distasteful.
https://youtu.be/0bkMIjv7Vqo
January 3, 2020
A very nice dieselpunk novel in unusual setting.
And I like snowcruisers :)
And I like snowcruisers :)
April 8, 2016
An interesting premise. This was a quick read. The story could have benefited from more character development, the characters are rather two dimensional. The world could have been explored more in depth and I would have liked to seen more of the bear race.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews