Ice Prison

by Kathleen Sky

[Back Cover]

"Mithras had been set up as a penal colony---no one would have gone to such a frozen hell voluntarily. Even five generations later, no inhabitant could escape from Mithras alive. And now, Howell discovered to his horror, the Confederation Colonial Service was using it as a dumping ground for its own troublemakers. He was marooned on Mithras---its new commandant, yet as much a prisoner as any convict. And to add to his tribulations, the entire colony was being terrorized by a fourteen-year-old girl."

Genres: Science Fiction

190 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 1, 1976

About the author

Kathleen Sky is the pen name of Kathleen McKinney Goldin, an American science fiction and fantasy author.

Reviews

[Dee Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love to read 2oth-century genre fiction by women, particularly science fiction. This was an interesting read as an historical artifact, although not a great book. It's fast-paced, which on the whole is a good thing, although it can feel rushed, particularly at the end. Some of the plotting is haphazard and feels almost like it could have benefitted from one more draft to fully bake some of the ideas; at its weakest, I think Ice Prison verges on being a series of things that happen rather than a series of things that happen for any particular reason as part of a story. The lack of a compelling villain is a problem as well, and the book's final big setpiece rests on the defeat of a bland character introduced in the last few chapters and someone else who's so consistently scorned as non-threatening and incapable that there's just not a lot of oomph there.

All of those are some general impressions but I'm avoiding the big thing that makes me scratch my head at this book as a woman reading it in 2023. Namely, why did Kathleen Sky make this a romance between a girl of 14 and a man of 87? Did an editor insist? Had she been reading Heinlein and she thought that's just what happened in SF? Was it a personal fantasy of some kind? And I mean, why not 70 and 40? 50 and 20? 126 and 18? Why did Kiedron have to be 14, and repeatedly described with some specificity as not fully sexually mature?

I like to read these kinds of old novels to get a glimpse at what a woman was thinking years ago, almost 50 years ago in this case, and in this particular instance I've certainly found an interesting enigma.

[Tina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5. I'm back and forth about this book. There are aspects about it that are great, but there are other aspects that are questionable or just plain off. It was fast-paced with a pretty cool (haha) concept, but the characters didn't make any sense. Keidron instantly changes from a bad ass revolutionary into a simpering child, which was really annoying. There was the addition of useless characters who have quite a bit of build-up but go no where which, in a less than 200 page book, just took up space. Finally, Howell's personality was not static - sometimes he was a hard ass who was only interested in his career, sometimes he was all about helping the people, and sometimes he just didn't act like a supposed 87 year old. True, in real life no one's personality is the same all the time, but the book didn't elucidate why these fluctuations were occuring, nor did they seem to stem from his past history or anything like that. Frankly, we know next to nothing about Howell, and in the end it seems we're in the same place. Also, I'm not sure why Kiedron needed to be 14 to accomplish what she did - all her young her age did was add a "consensual" Lolita/stockholme syndrome aspect to the novel, which I'm sure would have been a lot more sexy and WAY less creepy had Kiedron been 24 instead of 14. Anyways, the novel is far from boring and has quite a few redeeming qualities, but overall it's simply ok.