kay, so back in the seventies, I really loved Alan Dean Foster’s stories. They were funny and exciting and great reads. And now I picked up one that’s a half century old, Icerigger. Of course, the question is, how does it keep up with modern scifi? Not StarWars either, but adult series like The Expanse.

So in Icerigger, a passenger liner is making a stop at a colony world, one totally covered in a sea of ice. During ship’s night (as they orbit in) the main character, a merchant named Ethan Fortune, comes across a kidnapping in progress. The inept kidnappers are grabbing an industrialist and his daughter, but have encountered a retired schoolteacher at the lifeboat docks. Grabbing him and Ethan, they cast off but are too close when the bomb they planted in the docks goes off. Their ship shredded, they crash land on the opposite side of the planet from the colony. And it gets down to below zero at night (and zero during the days). The wind howls. However will they return to civilization? The only base is on the far side of the planet.

Well, they are discovered by the inhabitants, indigenous people who can use underarm sails and foot claws to skate across the ice. Having made contact, they are brought to a craggy castle with its medieval city packed in its protective walls. And not a moment too soon, since the Horde (exactly what they sound like) are approaching to demand tribute and supplies.

It’s pretty much the same thing as my own book, Early ReTyrement. Educated and knowledgeable high-tech beings come and save the asses of primitives, showing them how to either better their tech or use it in more effective ways. Nothing wrong with that; the trope comes from Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Old as the hills.

But if I did have to complain about “loose storytelling”, I’d have to mention that, for a colony with lifters as easy to use as tugboats, the settlement doesn’t seem to have any awareness of their world. They are oblivious to the huge indigenous empires that cover the surface. They don’t seem to have a way of tracking a disabled lifeboat that had been jettisoned, and cannot find the crash site (they weren’t even looking). They don’t even have a working system of satellites up – I mean, all they need is a standard orbiter to put in a lifter, take it up to orbit and kick it out. It costs my city more to put up Christmas lights every year. That they have no knowledge of actual fortress towns all over the rest of their planet seems rather far-fetched.

And if we’ve never made contact with these inhabitants, how does the hero and most of his party know how to speak their language? They are jabbering like crows within a day or so.

And those aliens – we find out later in the book that this entire ice-age world came about only a thousand or two years ago. So why would the aliens evolve with little wings and foot claws if their world was temperate?

I mean, a lot of this really bugged me. I did like the iceriggers vessels themselves. A while back, I was writing a novel that had similar iceriggers in it. Man, those things really haul.

Anyway, a good book if you wish to sample historic science fiction. The plot holes really bugged me (as you can see). Your mileage may vary.

>>>YOU CAN FIND MY BOOKS, INCLUDING EARLY RETYREMENT, DOWN THIS LINK!<<<