This blog entry should be read in conjunction with chapter fifteen. On the ice is almost self-consciously visual and descriptive, as if to make up for terseness of previous chapters, with their emphasis on dialogue and characterization!
I owe an obvious debt here to James Blish’s wonderful novel of polar exploration, The Frozen Year, published to coincide with International Geophysical Year in 1957 (coincidentally the year of my birth, so I span the Space Age, but that’s another story!). The embryonic and aforementioned Age makes an appearance at the end of this novel with the announcement that the Americans have launched the first artificial satellite! Clearly, in 1956 nobody in the USA would have believed that it would be the Soviet Union that launched the first successful space probe!
None of this detracts from the grandeur of Blish’s epic…
Sal’s optical phenomenon described in On the ice is also a direct lift from Blish’s novel where it’s given the name ‘copper dawn’! I have no idea if it has a real name, but I assume its a real phenomenon… Writing this blog now, it occurs to me that Marta also shares the fate of the discredited astronomer in The Frozen Year, in that she makes an amazing discovery but is unable to furnish the necessary scientific proof…
In narrative terms, On the ice continues the process whereby the Children explore their world. As the Equatorial regions are now considered too dangerous, they venture north to explore one of the planet’s two vast polar ice caps.
At this stage in Alpha five’s history both ice caps are immense, and lock up most of the world’s water between them; but they are also now in retreat, an indication that A5’s climate is now changing, and things are moving in favour of its indigenous inhabitants…
The interplay of climate and biosphere is to become a major theme of the series, and thus a driver of the action…
This process starts with the second of Marta’s two discoveries (the one she can’t prove!).
In this chapter we are presented with the gadfly activity of the Children, whose ephemeral lives buzz around (and are contrasted with), the implacability of the landscape, and the monolith that is geological time…
Marta and Priya confront this disjuncture when they discover the ‘ice crusty’ sealed in its blue prison…
We also observe the Children engaged in routine research (the nuts and bolts of their respective disciplines), and are reminded that they are members of a scientific expedition. Later, circumstance conspires to leave Marta and Sal alone together, an unfamiliar combination, which is prolonged by the arrival of the storm…
Finally, in the interplay between Marta and Priya, we see again that the younger girl is wise beyond her years, and is the grown-up in the relationship…