Author: Robert Silverberg
Cover Artist: Harry Schaare
Publisher: Dell
Binding: Paperback
Publication Date:1971
This is a pretty weak book even by the standards of its time. Even if it is targeted to young adults. It reads like a sort of Boy’s Own Adventure – especially because the characters are only boys … er, men.
For some reason Silverberg saw fit to exclude women not just from the action, but almost completely from the book. Sure, a few are mentioned at one point, collectively. And there’s a reference to the dead wife of one of the heroes (not by name). Apparently in writing a futuristic book for young people, women were considered superfluous.
Anyway, for centuries the world has been suffering an ice age. Obviously this book was written in the era pre-Greenhouse Effect when people were obsessed with Global Cooling.
In order to escape from the cold, the human race has mostly moved underground, save for a few barbarians on the surface. The city of New York has lost contact with the rest of the world, but a few within it have established a radio connection to London.
Unfortunately, New York is dominated by a kind of gerontocracy under the tyrannical Mayor Hawkes. The rulers of the city are happy with the way things are, and anything from the outside is considered a source of unrest. So the treasonous freethinkers are exiled from New York, kindly being given a vehicle and supplies.
After leaving their underground home (in the chapter boldly entitled ‘To The Surface!’) the heroes set off for London, across the largely frozen Atlantic (‘To The Sea!’).
They win their way through a series of episodic adventures, particularly with barbarian tribes, such as the Jerseys. They also learn about the history of the surface world, and the various groups of survivors, including a seafaring group, and the advanced inhabitants of the tropics.
These latter abandoned the developed nations of North America and Europe to their fate when the ice age began (and something more interesting could have been made of that).
Approaching London and making radio contact they begin to get the impression that they might not be welcomed with open arms. The British under Henry XII and their own Lord Mayor seem to have moved in a similar direction to the New Yorkers.
The book’s climax is an extremely annoying deus ex machina, an almost perfect coming of the cavalry, which made me want to throw the book across the room. I guess if anything can be said for it, it has an optimistic view of human nature.
Indeed, I’ll generously allow that the heroes are fairly enlightened men, preferring (a slightly patronising) discourse to violence (although they can take action when necessary).
Don’t judge Silverberg from this poor early novel, which he simply phoned in. He’s written much better. Since this book, he’s won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and been named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
If you want a better book set in an ice age, try Adam Roberts’ Snow (2004), or even Silverberg’s own At Winter’s End (1988).
