Forbidden Summit

by Kirk J Pocan

Nothing will stop Alois Anwar from reaching the last and greatest dream of his life; completing the impossible climb to the virgin summit of the highest mountain in the Toribol Galaxy. But first, he must fashion a workable team of climbers out of Ama's finest mountaineers. Can he take this talented group of deeply troubled and emotionally challenged misfits to the summit before they implode and tear each other apart?
But that's just the beginning of their troubles. How will they survive deadly parasites, period cyclones, killer Muxphoy predators, ice worms and an ongoing treachery of impassable obstacles?
This heart pumping, award winning sci fi page turner is an immersion of adventure, survival, triumph over adversity, and a masterful study of the complexities of prejudice, insecurity, fear and loneliness.
There is a reason this mountain has never been climbed, a secret tied to the deepest truth about the nature of life in the universe.

478 pages, Paperback

Published October 17, 2023

Reviews

[Anar Bella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirk J. Pocan has crafted something genuinely rare here, a science fiction novel that reads like a mountaineering memoir set in another galaxy. Following Commander Alois and his misfit team up the impossible peak of DanvediGarwal on the moon Utha was an experience I was not prepared for. The tension on the Grand Staircase alone had me holding my breath. When the ice wall collapsed and swallowed the entire Druitt expedition in the opening chapter, I knew this book would not play by any familiar rules. Highly recommended for anyone who loves adventure, alien worlds, and the unyielding human (or Amanian) spirit.

[Jane Ava · Rating 4 out of 5]

What struck me most about Forbidden Summit was how deeply Pocan develops each member of the climbing team. Alois is the obsessive, brilliant leader whose marriage is quietly crumbling under the weight of his ambition. Gunter Zweit is the cantankerous rescue soloist with a dark past and something to prove. And then there's Bluerose, the racist, arrogant gunslinger whose grudging respect for Mareem the Dorrigan is one of the most quietly moving character arcs I've read in a long time. The aliens feel genuinely alien, yet somehow deeply relatable.

[Jennifer Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a mountaineer myself, I'm usually skeptical when fiction ventures into high-altitude terrain, but Pocan clearly knows his stuff. The descriptions of ice walls, crevasses, bergschrunds, rope guns, and the brutal physiological toll of extreme altitude are strikingly authentic, even transplanted into an alien setting. The crevasse scene where TJ falls into the glacier and discovers a frozen body, only to have a living creature attack him, is terrifying in the best possible way. I finished this in two sittings.

[Corwin Ashford · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is this strange, haunting idea running through Forbidden Summit that the mountain itself is alive, a planetary consciousness the natives call the Chogori Principle. Pocan introduces it early through Alois's computer consultation (a hilarious scene, by the way) and then lets it simmer throughout the story. By the end, when the village Tarta tells Zweit that the mountain let him pass because his intentions were noble, you're left genuinely unsettled. Did the mountain choose them? It's a masterful piece of thematic ambiguity.

[Leah M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

My one complaint: Wintara, Alois's wife, is a fascinating character who gets frustratingly little space on the page. Her struggle with a husband defined by obsession, willing to sacrifice his marriage for a summit that may kill him, feels deeply real and emotionally grounded. The brief scene where she pleads with him to consult the computer before committing is heartbreaking. I hope a sequel revisits their relationship after the climb. Four stars because the book is excellent, five would require Wintara to get her own chapter.

[Jane Brandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final act of this book, where Gunter Zweit pushes alone toward the summit through Zweit's Chimney, is some of the most gripping solo survival fiction I have ever read. Here is a broken-down, deaf, injured old man, bleeding internally, frost-nipped, and talking to a baby voon he tucked under his jacket negotiating a volcanic dome on the highest mountain in the solar system. And yet you believe every word of it. Pocan earns the ending, and when Zweit stumbles back into the village dragging two half-dead Trescans, I actually pumped my fist.

[Kate Daniella · Rating 5 out of 5]

What sets Forbidden Summit apart from most sci-fi adventure novels is the biting political commentary running beneath the action. The Amanian Premier sponsors the climb purely to boost his poll numbers. The Ministry bureaucrats are venal, shortsighted, and utterly clueless about what climbing DanvediGarwal actually involves. Alois's friend Meko, the conspiracy theorist journalist, turns out to be exactly right about everything. Pocan skewers political opportunism and institutional corruption with a light touch that never derails the adventure. Brilliant.

[Jone Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too much sci-fi just transplants human culture into space with funny skin colors. Forbidden Summit does something better. The Druitts carry their dead to the summit out of cultural obligation, even when it's killing them. The Dorrigans climb for cash, full stop, and are completely unashamed about it. The Trescan climbers come from a militaristic arthropod-like species whose concept of brotherhood is profoundly different from the Amanians'. And the Tarwana villagers worship the mountain as a living consciousness. Each culture feels coherent and distinct.

[Elizabeth Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was not expecting this book to move me as deeply as it did. The final scenes in the village, Viola crossing the cultural divide to approach the broken Amanian support crew, the moment she sees Ziram alive on the rescue sled, Zweit's clumsy farewell to the Trescans, all of it hit me harder than I expected. Pocan builds to this emotional payoff patiently over hundreds of pages and it works. Both teams failed to summit Danvedi. Both suffered terribly. And something precious was born from that shared failure.

[Vionette Aldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

On paper, LohrMareem is a supporting character: a squid-like alien freight hauler who carries enormous loads and has a keen interest in weapons systems. In practice, he's the moral center of the novel. His patience, his thoughtfulness, his quiet dignity in the face of Bluerose's barely concealed racism, and then the stunning revelation that he's a member of the Jammali Peace Party, all of it makes him deeply compelling. The late-night campfire conversation between Mareem and Bluerose is the novel's finest scene.

[Nora Ellison · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a sequence mid-book where TJ is rescued from a deep crevasse and a massive, eyeless creature, a living feeding tube, latches onto his leg and tries to rip it from his hip socket while his teammates haul him up on a rope. I read it at midnight and had to put the book down. Pocan writes creature horror with complete conviction. The thing has no eyes, no ears, no visible purpose except feeding, and the detail that it had preserved a Coryellion corpse for centuries in the ice adds a layer of grim, slow-burn dread.

[Amanda Williams]

There's a sequence mid-book where TJ is rescued from a deep crevasse and a massive, eyeless creature, a living feeding tube, latches onto his leg and tries to rip it from his hip socket while his teammates haul him up on a rope. I read it at midnight and had to put the book down. Pocan writes creature horror with complete conviction. The thing has no eyes, no ears, no visible purpose except feeding, and the detail that it had preserved a Coryellion corpse for centuries in the ice adds a layer of grim, slow-burn dread.

[Harriet Austen · Rating 4 out of 5]

At its core, Forbidden Summit is a story about obsession. Alois knows climbing DanvediGarwal will likely kill him. His computer calculates odds of 1 in 5,042. His wife pleads with him not to go. His friend Meko warns him about political manipulation. He goes anyway. And the novel treats this not as heroism but as something more complicated, a compulsion as powerful as addiction, as honest as love, and potentially as destructive as either. Pocan never lets Alois be simply a hero. He's flawed, self-aware, and magnificent.

[Michael Bennet · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is not a quick read. Pocan builds a vast, complex universe with dozens of alien races, political factions, military histories, and cultural details. Sometimes the world-building slows the pacing. But when the climbing sequences kick in, the book becomes propulsive and almost impossible to put down. I found the political backdrop, Ama's ruling party sponsoring the climb purely as an electoral stunt, darkly satirical and entirely believable. A demanding but rewarding read.