March to Other Worlds Day 15 Beneath the Dark Ice by Greig Beck
March to Other Worlds Day 15 Beneath the Dark Ice by Greig Beck
To open the third week of the March to Other Worlds, I would like to introduce the reader to Greig Beck, who has an amazing gift for making whole primordial worlds come to life. In Beneath the Dark Ice, that world can be found in Antarctica deep in a cave network where there are just a ton of nasty surprises. The excuse for the expedition is the loss of a tycoon when his plane crashed into the ice over Antarctica, but the real reason for the expedition seems to be a quest for oil on the seventh continent. Unfortunately for the scientists and military men sent on the expedition, there’s a whole world down beneath the ice and it’s filled with hostile creatures. And just in case we forget that it’s Beck writing this, there are also hostile humans determined to make things even more deadly than this bizarre aberration of nature has already made things.
As you read, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a whole underground world. So, it’s not just the big bad monster that stalks the heroes from beginning to end (and believe me, that would have made this book super creepy and scary enough), but it’s a host of other predators that live and compete in this isolated ecosphere and are only too happy to discover if humans make a tasty treat. Every chapter is filled with suspense and danger—a problem made more acute by the impact of the stress on the various members of the group making people untrustworthy just at the moment that they most need to pull together.
If I have a complaint, and I’m not certain that I do, I think it is in the discovery of a sort of proto civilization—the granddaddy of all our ancient civilizations—beneath the Antarctic ice. This civilization provides a tremendous amount of interesting information on the big bad monster, but it’s that information that bothered me. Much of it comes in the form of carvings that the archaeologist in the group translates with remarkable ease. I’m not saying he instantly knows everything he’s seeing, but it’s my understanding that ancient writing of this sort is not easy to decipher and that it takes a long time to actually carve words (much less whole narratives) into the stone. I’m not confident that much of the carvings (tracing the journey of two brothers ten thousand years earlier) could have been written this way. Remember, Jules Verne only had Arne Saknussemm leave his initials and the date to mark his journey—not whole accounts of the adventures of two ancient heroes. So, I don’t think that part of the story holds up, but it is a very small complaint in a long and exciting adventure.
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