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Book Blog: Iron Winter by Stephen Baxter
May. 7th, 2016 01:48 pmMost of my journal has been book blog for awhile. Is this okay? Would readers like to read more angst? :-) Writer stuff? Rat news? Geez, my life really is endless excitement.
This book is a Book Three, finally appearing in the library long after I had read One and Two: Stone Spring and Bronze Summer which are alternate world novels where the divergence is caused by humans building a huge wall in Paleolithic times to hold back the sea which would have drowned a huge area of land once called Doggerlands, that linked Britain with the European land mass. Our world, in short. But there will be some spoilers, sorry, it's hard to avoid if you're going to properly describe a book.
It's a climate change novel with very different societies and humans, where human activity has not held back the ice age which should have returned, or not by much. The great society of Northland, which changed the world by not being drowned, is now in trouble which none of its scholars and engineers can halt. But maybe they can understand...and survive.
The characters seem less important than the world; they move through it and they cause great changes, but they seem oddly remote from one another. This seems to be a common thread with Baxter's characters, or so I have read, that they often show distinctly autistic traits. This was very strong with the original wall-builder, Ana, who was shown as regarding her fellow tribesfolk as simply pawns she could move around to get the result she wanted, i.e. the survival of everyone.
In Iron Winter, a Northlands mother is forced to put her son into the Carthaginian army, to battle the Hittites who have had to move their entire nation due to the advancing "long winter." When they reunite after years and she explains that this had been the price of her own and his sister's survival, the response is a shrugging, "I thought it must have been something like that." The best character, IMO, is the old Northland scholar who, with his Inuit sidekick Avatak, travels this very alternate world of the 1300s and gradually maps out what is happening and how the entire human race will have to change to survive it. I couldn't help seeing him in my mind as a sort of medieval David Attenborough. It was hard to really care about any of the characters, but the Iron Winter itself was compelling.
This book is a Book Three, finally appearing in the library long after I had read One and Two: Stone Spring and Bronze Summer which are alternate world novels where the divergence is caused by humans building a huge wall in Paleolithic times to hold back the sea which would have drowned a huge area of land once called Doggerlands, that linked Britain with the European land mass. Our world, in short. But there will be some spoilers, sorry, it's hard to avoid if you're going to properly describe a book.
It's a climate change novel with very different societies and humans, where human activity has not held back the ice age which should have returned, or not by much. The great society of Northland, which changed the world by not being drowned, is now in trouble which none of its scholars and engineers can halt. But maybe they can understand...and survive.
The characters seem less important than the world; they move through it and they cause great changes, but they seem oddly remote from one another. This seems to be a common thread with Baxter's characters, or so I have read, that they often show distinctly autistic traits. This was very strong with the original wall-builder, Ana, who was shown as regarding her fellow tribesfolk as simply pawns she could move around to get the result she wanted, i.e. the survival of everyone.
In Iron Winter, a Northlands mother is forced to put her son into the Carthaginian army, to battle the Hittites who have had to move their entire nation due to the advancing "long winter." When they reunite after years and she explains that this had been the price of her own and his sister's survival, the response is a shrugging, "I thought it must have been something like that." The best character, IMO, is the old Northland scholar who, with his Inuit sidekick Avatak, travels this very alternate world of the 1300s and gradually maps out what is happening and how the entire human race will have to change to survive it. I couldn't help seeing him in my mind as a sort of medieval David Attenborough. It was hard to really care about any of the characters, but the Iron Winter itself was compelling.