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Mammoth #3
Icebones
Icebones concludes Stephen Baxter's "Mammoth" trilogy about the lives, adventures and rich mythic tradition of mammoths. Silverhair featured a mammoth family surviving in modern times; Longtusk backtracked to the Ice Age; now it's AD 3000 and mammoths roam Mars, the Sky Steppe of their ancient legends...
Icebones, daughter of the first book's Silverhair, wakes from suspended animation high up Mons Olympus, the solar system's greatest volcano. Humans ("the Lost") partly terraformed Mars and seeded it with mammoths, but for their own inscrutable reasons have gone home. Already Icebones's untutored cousins, accustomed to being fed like pets, are beginning to starve.
Our heroine's demanding duty is clear. She must make herself Matriarch of the mammoth group, show them how to forage on this alien steppe, pass on the old teaching legends and Just-So stories of mammothdom, and lead her quarrelsome family on an epic trek across the once again dying world, hoping for sanctuary in the lowest of the lowlands.
The shattered geography of Mars is only part of the challenge. Other species are battling extinction: huge predatory cats and birds, a genetically engineered breed of mammoth, and homages to HG Wells and Frank Herbert in the form of deadly red weed and sandworms. Worst of all, abandoned terraforming tools are still erratically active, triggering upheavals of earth, air, fire and water. And at journey's end, an entirely different kind of problem awaits.
With Icebones, Stephen Baxter brings the mingled history and mythology of mammothkind to a satisfying, touching conclusion. --David Langford
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 15, 2013
There is such a thing as 'over-description' and I believe that's what the most prominent flaw in Icebones and the Mammoth series is.
Indeed there's nothing wrong with description. It's beautiful; it forms a painted picture within our minds as the words flow lyrically together. However when it comes to the Mammoth series the one way to overwhelm your readers' minds is to stuff description down their throats, to the point where describing mammoth dung and fertilized ground can take up an entire page.
The problem is that the words don't necessarily flow in Icebones. While the other two novels in the series were more like non-fiction text books about the study of mammoths in general and didn't have the smoothest of narratives I still found myself enjoying some moments. This one just ended up giving me a thumping head ache at the end of it. The novel isn't without its merits and gleaming flashes of intelligence of course; the Mammoth mind is still well-rounded and realistic, which is quite a high point. And the idea, no matter how exaggerated, is wonderfully creative. (There aren't many books on actual mammoths, aren't there?) And I wouldn't have read all the way up to Icebones if I hadn't enjoyed the first two books, no matter their sharp flaws.
However I think in Icebones it's second flaw would be the setting. Silverhair had a very cold and almost brutal atmosphere; Longtusk had quite the opposite. Both books were surprisingly atmospheric and provided a sense of odd curiosity and adventure.
In Icebones everything is dusty, silent, and dry. There doesn't seem much to be standing out about it, besides its premise and its odd cast of Mammoth characters.
In the end I'd like to rate it more. However the series just panders and drags with over-descriptive pages of things that don't really matter; a lonely and isolated premise; and parts of the novel that just became bogged down and boring. There were moments I enjoyed equally but not enough to warrant a cure to my head-ache after closing the novel, and by the fact that I trudged through it.
It's a very ambiguous end to the Mammoth series. But the flaws I had with Silverhair and Longtusk shine its brightest in Icebones, and while I appreciate the research and interesting ideas put into this series, I just can't bring myself to rate it all three stars.
Seriously though by the end of these three novels I could go to University and graduate in a diploma of mammoth feces. That's how much it's described, mentioned and talked about in all these three books. I've become an educated scientist in it.
Indeed there's nothing wrong with description. It's beautiful; it forms a painted picture within our minds as the words flow lyrically together. However when it comes to the Mammoth series the one way to overwhelm your readers' minds is to stuff description down their throats, to the point where describing mammoth dung and fertilized ground can take up an entire page.
The problem is that the words don't necessarily flow in Icebones. While the other two novels in the series were more like non-fiction text books about the study of mammoths in general and didn't have the smoothest of narratives I still found myself enjoying some moments. This one just ended up giving me a thumping head ache at the end of it. The novel isn't without its merits and gleaming flashes of intelligence of course; the Mammoth mind is still well-rounded and realistic, which is quite a high point. And the idea, no matter how exaggerated, is wonderfully creative. (There aren't many books on actual mammoths, aren't there?) And I wouldn't have read all the way up to Icebones if I hadn't enjoyed the first two books, no matter their sharp flaws.
However I think in Icebones it's second flaw would be the setting. Silverhair had a very cold and almost brutal atmosphere; Longtusk had quite the opposite. Both books were surprisingly atmospheric and provided a sense of odd curiosity and adventure.
In Icebones everything is dusty, silent, and dry. There doesn't seem much to be standing out about it, besides its premise and its odd cast of Mammoth characters.
In the end I'd like to rate it more. However the series just panders and drags with over-descriptive pages of things that don't really matter; a lonely and isolated premise; and parts of the novel that just became bogged down and boring. There were moments I enjoyed equally but not enough to warrant a cure to my head-ache after closing the novel, and by the fact that I trudged through it.
It's a very ambiguous end to the Mammoth series. But the flaws I had with Silverhair and Longtusk shine its brightest in Icebones, and while I appreciate the research and interesting ideas put into this series, I just can't bring myself to rate it all three stars.
Seriously though by the end of these three novels I could go to University and graduate in a diploma of mammoth feces. That's how much it's described, mentioned and talked about in all these three books. I've become an educated scientist in it.
November 13, 2017
"'I have nothing to offer you,' Icebones said, 'Nothing but truth and dignity.' The Ragged One snorted contempt, 'I cannot eat truth. I cannot drink dignity.'"
This final instalment in the epoch-spanning, ecologically ambitious, Mammoth series brings together the relationship between humans and our rare wild relatives on this earth into a fascinating and original tale of planetary colonisation from the point of view of the animals uprooted by man and brought to their salvation among the stars.
Icebones, the last vaginally born mammoth has been cryogenically frozen for a thousand years and awakes amid the wreckage of the abandoned human colony on Mars. "She rejoiced, for she was whole again, immersed in her body, and in the world. But it was not the world she had known." Disoriented and detached from the life she knew, Icebones is confronted by captive mammoths on the side of Olymus Mons, waiting in the barren shell of an abandoned zoo for their human masters to return. "'I never heard of mammoths without names, a Family that wasn't a Family, Cows without a Matriarch.'" Baxter captures the cultural destruction caused by uprooting animals from their natural herds, and, more fundamentally, from the land itself in the lack of identity of the mammoths Icebones meets, and her relative maturity compared to much older animals. "This untidy rabble rumbled over the ground as if the others did not exist, or matter." The writing shows infinite respect for animal culture.
Although these are not quite mammoths. Spindle-legged, gangly, and beautified, these mammoths are the hybrids with African elephants, a new kind of animal devoid of culture heritage. Born from artificial wombs like the dystopian lab at the beginning of A Brave New World. Among them is the Ragged One, the last African elephant, true-born as Icebones and viciously resentful that her kind are now lost. "'Gone. Dead. I am alone. I am not like the others.'" Despite this understanding, perhaps because of it, the Ragged One opposes herself to Icebones and desperately calls back the human presence to Mars. "Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that the world had not always been the same as this - that there were other ways for mammoths to live." But the same coincidental kindness that freed Icebones from cryogenic freezing has left the mammoths untouched. Free and ignorant.
Here the mammoths have a chance to live "'until the sun itself grows cold.'"
Icebones' greatest adversary is not rival animals, but the planet itself. The deep, geological sensations experienced by the mammoths give Mars a character "And so she listened, with every aspect of her being, to the deep sounds, the songs of the earth. And gradually she built up an image, in sounds and echoes, of the spinning rocky ball to which she clung." It is stark and brooding and beyond comprehension. This "small, round, hard - and strange" planet is passively hostile to life, "a small, swollen, battered place, born in unimaginable violence, bruised by ancient blows from which it had never healed." At other times, Mars seems horrifically sentient to Icebones. "The Mountain thrust out of the belly of this world, as if some monstrous planetary calf was struggling to be born." The scale of the landscape, from Olymus Mons to the Noctis Labyrinthus and the Velles Marinaris is vast and sharp. "This was a walled world." The terrain heaps challenges on Icebones which are all the more difficult for having no context in her past, for being new experiences that she did not ask for or anticipate. "a new impossible unreality in this unreal world." This sense that the planet itself repels and frightens the animals humans have brought to colonise it, the sheer lack of consent in this migration, is incredibly thought-provoking. "The cliff was a wall that cut the sky in half, and it was oppressive, crushing: like a wall of time, she thought, separating her from her family" We might need animals to help terraform a new planet, but how does this fit into our current understanding of ethics?
"The Lost are powerful. But the making of a world will always be beyond them."
The mammoths cross the face of the planet under Icebones' leadership. "Wisdom must be earned through pain and loss. That was what the mammoths were struggling to learn." The constant breaking of new terrain drains her. "Who am I to inflict such pain on these loyal, patient, suffering mammoths? How do I know that this is right?" Like a climber facing K2, Icebones suffers an existential delirium, heightened by her lack of conscious choice in being relocated here. "She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the bones of the reconstructed mammoth on the Fire Mountain." Her confusion in this hallucinatory landscape heightens her humanity, and makes Baxter's Mars more real as it becomes more strange. "Sometimes these waking dreams were so vivid that she wondered if this time of redness and desolation was the recollection." Icebones is deeply uncomfortable in a world where every flat surface is scoured rock, the air tastes of metal, see six-sided skeletons embedded in the rock around her, and storms the size of continents batter against the meagre shield of her flesh. There is a human-like wonder, but drowning under a deluge of primordial, insular, fear.
"She felt a surge of wonder. Despite the noise, her pain, the imminent danger, despite the rock's shuddering, she longed to know where that ancient animal had been going - what it had wanted, how it had died."
But Icebones, with her intimate understanding of how to communicate with the land, finds her way to the Hellas crated where the last of Mars' terraformed air has drained. She meets ancient extinct evolutionary cousins reborn in the clinical void of human kindness, and genetically engineered creatures modelled after her by laboratory natural selection to terraform the barren landscape. "'You do not understand,' Cold-As-Sky said bleakly, 'It was our destiny to die. To make this world, and then die away, leaving it for you.'" Each is an equal in life to Icebones. She sees their creation as a frightening act of power, their conservation here on Mars without a continuous genetic heritage as a deeply ambiguous gift. "'If it was love, they loved us too much.'" But with the ultimate grace of a born survivor, she calls them all to Hellas, the Footprint of her great ancestor Kilukpuk, where there is air to breath and water to drink. Because anything else, to Icebones, would be to presume and dare too much.
I have never thought so much about the purpose and ultimate aim of animal conservation, and especially how we treat extinct animals and critically endangered animals in the light of modern technology. A really philosophical book where the animals are more human than the humans.
"'Theirs was just a brief moment of pain and change and death - but in that moment they gave us a new world.'"
This final instalment in the epoch-spanning, ecologically ambitious, Mammoth series brings together the relationship between humans and our rare wild relatives on this earth into a fascinating and original tale of planetary colonisation from the point of view of the animals uprooted by man and brought to their salvation among the stars.
Icebones, the last vaginally born mammoth has been cryogenically frozen for a thousand years and awakes amid the wreckage of the abandoned human colony on Mars. "She rejoiced, for she was whole again, immersed in her body, and in the world. But it was not the world she had known." Disoriented and detached from the life she knew, Icebones is confronted by captive mammoths on the side of Olymus Mons, waiting in the barren shell of an abandoned zoo for their human masters to return. "'I never heard of mammoths without names, a Family that wasn't a Family, Cows without a Matriarch.'" Baxter captures the cultural destruction caused by uprooting animals from their natural herds, and, more fundamentally, from the land itself in the lack of identity of the mammoths Icebones meets, and her relative maturity compared to much older animals. "This untidy rabble rumbled over the ground as if the others did not exist, or matter." The writing shows infinite respect for animal culture.
Although these are not quite mammoths. Spindle-legged, gangly, and beautified, these mammoths are the hybrids with African elephants, a new kind of animal devoid of culture heritage. Born from artificial wombs like the dystopian lab at the beginning of A Brave New World. Among them is the Ragged One, the last African elephant, true-born as Icebones and viciously resentful that her kind are now lost. "'Gone. Dead. I am alone. I am not like the others.'" Despite this understanding, perhaps because of it, the Ragged One opposes herself to Icebones and desperately calls back the human presence to Mars. "Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that the world had not always been the same as this - that there were other ways for mammoths to live." But the same coincidental kindness that freed Icebones from cryogenic freezing has left the mammoths untouched. Free and ignorant.
Here the mammoths have a chance to live "'until the sun itself grows cold.'"
Icebones' greatest adversary is not rival animals, but the planet itself. The deep, geological sensations experienced by the mammoths give Mars a character "And so she listened, with every aspect of her being, to the deep sounds, the songs of the earth. And gradually she built up an image, in sounds and echoes, of the spinning rocky ball to which she clung." It is stark and brooding and beyond comprehension. This "small, round, hard - and strange" planet is passively hostile to life, "a small, swollen, battered place, born in unimaginable violence, bruised by ancient blows from which it had never healed." At other times, Mars seems horrifically sentient to Icebones. "The Mountain thrust out of the belly of this world, as if some monstrous planetary calf was struggling to be born." The scale of the landscape, from Olymus Mons to the Noctis Labyrinthus and the Velles Marinaris is vast and sharp. "This was a walled world." The terrain heaps challenges on Icebones which are all the more difficult for having no context in her past, for being new experiences that she did not ask for or anticipate. "a new impossible unreality in this unreal world." This sense that the planet itself repels and frightens the animals humans have brought to colonise it, the sheer lack of consent in this migration, is incredibly thought-provoking. "The cliff was a wall that cut the sky in half, and it was oppressive, crushing: like a wall of time, she thought, separating her from her family" We might need animals to help terraform a new planet, but how does this fit into our current understanding of ethics?
"The Lost are powerful. But the making of a world will always be beyond them."
The mammoths cross the face of the planet under Icebones' leadership. "Wisdom must be earned through pain and loss. That was what the mammoths were struggling to learn." The constant breaking of new terrain drains her. "Who am I to inflict such pain on these loyal, patient, suffering mammoths? How do I know that this is right?" Like a climber facing K2, Icebones suffers an existential delirium, heightened by her lack of conscious choice in being relocated here. "She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the bones of the reconstructed mammoth on the Fire Mountain." Her confusion in this hallucinatory landscape heightens her humanity, and makes Baxter's Mars more real as it becomes more strange. "Sometimes these waking dreams were so vivid that she wondered if this time of redness and desolation was the recollection." Icebones is deeply uncomfortable in a world where every flat surface is scoured rock, the air tastes of metal, see six-sided skeletons embedded in the rock around her, and storms the size of continents batter against the meagre shield of her flesh. There is a human-like wonder, but drowning under a deluge of primordial, insular, fear.
"She felt a surge of wonder. Despite the noise, her pain, the imminent danger, despite the rock's shuddering, she longed to know where that ancient animal had been going - what it had wanted, how it had died."
But Icebones, with her intimate understanding of how to communicate with the land, finds her way to the Hellas crated where the last of Mars' terraformed air has drained. She meets ancient extinct evolutionary cousins reborn in the clinical void of human kindness, and genetically engineered creatures modelled after her by laboratory natural selection to terraform the barren landscape. "'You do not understand,' Cold-As-Sky said bleakly, 'It was our destiny to die. To make this world, and then die away, leaving it for you.'" Each is an equal in life to Icebones. She sees their creation as a frightening act of power, their conservation here on Mars without a continuous genetic heritage as a deeply ambiguous gift. "'If it was love, they loved us too much.'" But with the ultimate grace of a born survivor, she calls them all to Hellas, the Footprint of her great ancestor Kilukpuk, where there is air to breath and water to drink. Because anything else, to Icebones, would be to presume and dare too much.
I have never thought so much about the purpose and ultimate aim of animal conservation, and especially how we treat extinct animals and critically endangered animals in the light of modern technology. A really philosophical book where the animals are more human than the humans.
"'Theirs was just a brief moment of pain and change and death - but in that moment they gave us a new world.'"
October 18, 2019
After the two very strong entries which began this trilogy, "Icebones" is a bit of a bust. On the plus side, the author's fertile imagination is as active as ever as he conjures up another inventive extraterrestrial landscape. He then populates it with unusual life forms and sprinkles in a smattering of clever future technologies. But all of that, of course, is merely a baseline for Stephen Baxter, and, for me at any rate, did not make up for this novel's deficiencies.
I expected that a variety of loose ends which were left open in the first two volumes would be satisfactorily explained, but instead Baxter compounds them with a heap of further unresolved mysteries, primarily centered around the role of the "Lost" (i.e., human beings) in this centuries-spanning trilogy about wooly mammoths. This central flaw is exacerbated by a plot which is literally meandering, as it follows a small family of mammoths on a globe-spanning trek in search of a safe haven in which to thrive. While this, in and of itself, is the stuff of every questing tale, the devil is in the details, and here the details come across as arbitrary and somewhat forced. The endless descriptions of rarely-varying landscapes which slowed the pace of the previous two volumes drags it down to a veritable crawl here. It is as if Baxter wrote to a formula: action sequence here; dialogue/inner monologue here; detailed description of landscape here; rinse and repeat.
While I am one of Baxter's greatest admirers, this does not represent his finest moment by a long shot. It should probably be approached only by those who are completists and are seeking closure to the first two books in this series, but they should do so with the knowledge that closure is bound to be incomplete.
I expected that a variety of loose ends which were left open in the first two volumes would be satisfactorily explained, but instead Baxter compounds them with a heap of further unresolved mysteries, primarily centered around the role of the "Lost" (i.e., human beings) in this centuries-spanning trilogy about wooly mammoths. This central flaw is exacerbated by a plot which is literally meandering, as it follows a small family of mammoths on a globe-spanning trek in search of a safe haven in which to thrive. While this, in and of itself, is the stuff of every questing tale, the devil is in the details, and here the details come across as arbitrary and somewhat forced. The endless descriptions of rarely-varying landscapes which slowed the pace of the previous two volumes drags it down to a veritable crawl here. It is as if Baxter wrote to a formula: action sequence here; dialogue/inner monologue here; detailed description of landscape here; rinse and repeat.
While I am one of Baxter's greatest admirers, this does not represent his finest moment by a long shot. It should probably be approached only by those who are completists and are seeking closure to the first two books in this series, but they should do so with the knowledge that closure is bound to be incomplete.
August 30, 2013
This book describes Icebones life and adventures on the planet Mars. How she comes to be there and how she helps the mammoths journey to a saver place. The ending is probably the best part of the book, and not because it is the ending. It gives to an idea of how the Lost ("aka humans"?) go on to use a place or thing and when they have worn it out or it is no longer useful leave for some place better. It also makes you wonder what are we doing to our planet.
October 29, 2020
The previous two books alluded to mammoth being on Mars, here we finally find out how and why. The story kicks of with a great peril already established leaving the mammoths in a hopeless situation as they try to survive. The mounting tension and sense of ineffectiveness abounds throughout, which does make for a somewhat depressing read. Mars is dying and the humans who had brought the mammoths with them have abandoned their failed terraforming project. Despite the sheer hopelessness of their situation Icebones, the only mammoth who remembers being on Earth, makes a herculean effort to save herself and her kind. I loved how the mammoth's mythology that has been built up over the series is put through its paces as the mammoths try to apply it to an alien world, and rewrite it as applicable.
I think some of the creatures the mammoths encounter did stretch the levels of plausibility a little far, but much of the imagery was hauntingly realistic. The deserted city with the automated robot busses going on their routes despite there being no passengers was chilling. The ending made this trilogy well worth it.
I think some of the creatures the mammoths encounter did stretch the levels of plausibility a little far, but much of the imagery was hauntingly realistic. The deserted city with the automated robot busses going on their routes despite there being no passengers was chilling. The ending made this trilogy well worth it.
August 22, 2022
Great trilogy about Mammoths from a possible near future, back to the distant past and then to a speculative future in this third installment. Great storytelling,
June 8, 2016
I picked the book for bed-time reading without knowing much about it. Icebones journey was motivating and positive. I did cry at the end for Icebones, appreciated her journey and wisdom. I felt sad that she had to make sacrifice, I felt she did not deserve it, she deserved better. Her journey made me want to know what happens next and eventually led me to finish the book. In my opinion, this is a book that one can reach to the end, but may find it difficult to finish in one go. So it was suitable for bed-time reading. In addition, the mammoth related terminologies, their interpretation of the world with different names, for example beetles for robots and machines, steppe for the planet, Lost for people, were difficult to guess and I took time to understand their true meaning from context. It prohibited me from getting into the rhythm of reading.
August 2, 2023
Το τρίτο μέρος της τρολογίας Behemoth είναι και αυτό που απαιτεί τη μεγαλύτερη "ηθελημένη άρση δυσπιστίας" του αναγνώστη, καθώς ξεφεύγει από το κλασικό προϊστορικό πλαίσιο και τοποθετείται στο μέλλον, αν και ο αναγνώστης δεν το αντιλαμβάνεται άμεσα αυτό.
Ωστόσο, δεχόμενος τη βασική παραδοχή που απαιτεί η ιστορία, ο αναγνώστης απολαμβάνει την περιπέτεια της Icebones, ίσως ακόμη περισσότερο όταν η αλήθεια για τα whereabouts της αποκαλύπτεται μπροστά του.
Μπορεί να μην είμαστε τόσο σάπιοι όσο νομίζαμε, ως είδος.
Αυτή η τριλογία, μπορεί να μην είναι το απαύγασμα της τελειότητας της επιστημονικής φαντασίας, αλλά δεν παύει να είναι μια πολύ ευχάριστη εμπειρία η ανάγνωσή της, με τους από καιρό εξαφανισμένους ευγενικούς και δυνατούς γίγαντες ήρωές της. Δώστε της μια ευκαιρία, θα σας ανταμείψει.
Ωστόσο, δεχόμενος τη βασική παραδοχή που απαιτεί η ιστορία, ο αναγνώστης απολαμβάνει την περιπέτεια της Icebones, ίσως ακόμη περισσότερο όταν η αλήθεια για τα whereabouts της αποκαλύπτεται μπροστά του.
Μπορεί να μην είμαστε τόσο σάπιοι όσο νομίζαμε, ως είδος.
Αυτή η τριλογία, μπορεί να μην είναι το απαύγασμα της τελειότητας της επιστημονικής φαντασίας, αλλά δεν παύει να είναι μια πολύ ευχάριστη εμπειρία η ανάγνωσή της, με τους από καιρό εξαφανισμένους ευγενικούς και δυνατούς γίγαντες ήρωές της. Δώστε της μια ευκαιρία, θα σας ανταμείψει.
April 4, 2012
Probably the best of the uniformly excellent Mammoth trilogy by Baxter. Great characterization (especially for non-humans) and the author excels at creating a realistic mind-set of a talking, thinking and feeling mammoth. I can understand why this series isn't more popular.
August 8, 2012
This was a thrilling and fantastic conclusion to the Mammoth Trilogy.
October 19, 2015
A novel about the colonization of Mars, Icebones does not have a single human character. It has a cast of mammoths, and it is easily my favorite Baxter novel.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews