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Ice and iron
Hardcover.
181 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Wilson Tucker
64 books35 followersArthur Wilson "Bob" Tucker was an American mystery, action adventure, and science fiction writer, who wrote as Wilson Tucker.
He was also a prominent member of science fiction fandom, who wrote extensively for fanzines under the name Bob Tucker, a family nickname bestowed in childhood.
He was also a prominent member of science fiction fandom, who wrote extensively for fanzines under the name Bob Tucker, a family nickname bestowed in childhood.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
January 4, 2026
Ice and Iron was published by Doubleday in 1974 and was a main selection of The Science Fiction Book Club (which was a big deal back then) and then was released in mass market paperback format late in 1975 by Ballantine (before they became Del Rey) with a slightly different title (Ice & Iron, the version I read) and with a completely different ending. It's a fast-paced, fascinating book about a man investigating dramatic climate change, Fisher Highsmith, who encounters a strange mystery; naked cavemen falling out of the sky. Highsmith is portrayed as an amusing, charming, roguish individual (remember it was 1974), but would probably now be seen as despicably sexist. Tucker incorporates elements of suspense, Fortean speculation (Charles Fort never mentioned wombats, as Tucker's pal Buck Coulson taught us...but never mind), and interesting scientific ideas involving anthropology, climatology, and geology. It's an overlooked near classic with vastly different alternating viewpoint chapters that seem equally valid. Tucker was a very good writer who fell somewhat into disfavor with age, but his works shouldn't be forgotten; this was one of his best.
August 10, 2014
Thin book, quick read. Aspects of time travel (Mesopotamian bricks?) and climate change and gynarchy; I really liked the alternating chapters. Some chapters mention the events of other chapters but from a different perspective - I've always been a sucker for that. Also, the main character (Fisher) is quite humorous at times.
Drawbacks - the story ends somewhat abruptly, with no real resolution.
Bonus - the supporting character who mentions the research of Charles Fort. More well known today than in the early seventies, and my favorite phenomenologist. I definitely enjoy Wilson Tucker's writing style and will seek out more in the near future.
Drawbacks - the story ends somewhat abruptly, with no real resolution.
Bonus - the supporting character who mentions the research of Charles Fort. More well known today than in the early seventies, and my favorite phenomenologist. I definitely enjoy Wilson Tucker's writing style and will seek out more in the near future.
February 12, 2025
Romanzo interessante e di piacevole lettura, ma ci sono vari punti non spiegati ed il finale lascia un po' di amaro.
May 29, 2025
This wasn't a complete waste of time, but it came close. It felt like a short story premise stretched to novel length, and despite that it didn't even manage to explore its subjects that deeply.
Set in a near future where the onset of a new ice age has pushed the northern population to the southern US and Mexico, it follows a group of scientists near the edge of the ice sheet investigating the strange appearances of random organic matter, primitive tools and naked human bodies. Alternating chapters follow primitive humans living near a retreating ice sheet in the same area. The protagonist, Fisher Highsmith, theorizes the bodies are coming from the future, from a population thousands of years in the future, after the current glaciation.
I'm always down for cavemen, but this book just could not pull itself together. The "present" chapters are generally okay, but they read like the author just wanted to show off his reading on glacier geology and tie it in to something he read in Ripley's Believe It or Not!. Granted, my high school geography class had a whole unit about glaciers, so most of this was already familiar to me. Highsmith never has to deal with any setbacks or make significant alterations to his theory, and it just keeps getting confirmed. There are some amusing incidents but nothing particularly interesting.
The caveman chapters are kind of interesting in concept. They're mostly unrelated to the main story except in a few particulars, don't follow a single set of characters, and they don't move through time in a particular direction. The first four are interestingly structured, with the fourth starting before and covering the time period of the first three, the third covering the period of the first two, and the first and second occuring on the same day, but that isn't clear until the later chapters. But they never build up to anything. They're just set dressing to provide a concrete view of what Highsmith is theorizing. And as set dressing, I find them deficient. There's no discernable social structure to the cavemen, who just seem to roam around solitarily, killing and/or raping whoever they encounter. The invading matriarchy is a blackhole of questions. What turned them into a matriarchy? Why did they reimplement monarchy? How did they invent time machine guns? Did they forget how to make regular guns? How did Spanish crowd out English and not vice versa? Highsmith learns the answers to none of these questions, and neither does the reader.
There are two endings to this novel.
Fun fact: the author coined the term "space opera".
Set in a near future where the onset of a new ice age has pushed the northern population to the southern US and Mexico, it follows a group of scientists near the edge of the ice sheet investigating the strange appearances of random organic matter, primitive tools and naked human bodies. Alternating chapters follow primitive humans living near a retreating ice sheet in the same area. The protagonist, Fisher Highsmith, theorizes the bodies are coming from the future, from a population thousands of years in the future, after the current glaciation.
I'm always down for cavemen, but this book just could not pull itself together. The "present" chapters are generally okay, but they read like the author just wanted to show off his reading on glacier geology and tie it in to something he read in Ripley's Believe It or Not!. Granted, my high school geography class had a whole unit about glaciers, so most of this was already familiar to me. Highsmith never has to deal with any setbacks or make significant alterations to his theory, and it just keeps getting confirmed. There are some amusing incidents but nothing particularly interesting.
The caveman chapters are kind of interesting in concept. They're mostly unrelated to the main story except in a few particulars, don't follow a single set of characters, and they don't move through time in a particular direction. The first four are interestingly structured, with the fourth starting before and covering the time period of the first three, the third covering the period of the first two, and the first and second occuring on the same day, but that isn't clear until the later chapters. But they never build up to anything. They're just set dressing to provide a concrete view of what Highsmith is theorizing. And as set dressing, I find them deficient. There's no discernable social structure to the cavemen, who just seem to roam around solitarily, killing and/or raping whoever they encounter. The invading matriarchy is a blackhole of questions. What turned them into a matriarchy? Why did they reimplement monarchy? How did they invent time machine guns? Did they forget how to make regular guns? How did Spanish crowd out English and not vice versa? Highsmith learns the answers to none of these questions, and neither does the reader.
There are two endings to this novel.
Fun fact: the author coined the term "space opera".
April 7, 2024
I read this book many (many) years ago - partly due to the cover being from of the artists I collect care of the Paper Tiger series (see Parallel lines). However I think it was so long ago the records never got to Goodreads so I thought it was time to fire it up again and give it a go.
The story posses a lot of questions (which I am not sure if they answer properly or not) but rather a case of looking at the fall out from posing a "what if.." question.
What I am trying and probably badly saying is - is if a question was posed what would the results be and the story explores the results of those results (rather than the original question). So a clever book I am pleased to have revisited - now I have to process it.
The story posses a lot of questions (which I am not sure if they answer properly or not) but rather a case of looking at the fall out from posing a "what if.." question.
What I am trying and probably badly saying is - is if a question was posed what would the results be and the story explores the results of those results (rather than the original question). So a clever book I am pleased to have revisited - now I have to process it.
May 16, 2026
By most accounts, Wilson Tucker is a relatively minor science fiction author. That being said, a lot of well-informed accounts also give him credit for his time travel novels like *The Lincoln Hunters* or *The Year of the Quiet Sun* (the latter was featured in David Pringle's seminal list *Science Fiction: the 100 Best Novels*, which I just read a few days ago). While I'd never heard any critical analysis mention *Ice and Iron*, I couldn't pass up the shot to experience Wilson Tucker when I saw a nice paperback copy for only a couple bucks at a Half Price Books in the middle of an already significant book-buying spree. Unfortunately, I can now honestly say that there's a reason why critics point towards his other works when discussing his career... *Ice & Iron* isn't very memorable. I don't want to say that it isn't very good because I think there's a lot of potential for greatness here, but at the end of the day, that's what it's limited to potential. Tucker doesn't fully accomplish what he sets out to achieve. Still, is that a sin?... I'll be the judge of that, right after I left you know what this book is about...
*Ice & Iron* starts somewhere in the twenty-first century in a world where global cooling is leading a slate of glaciers on a comeback tour through Canada. Fisher Yann Highsmith lives at a base in a part of Canada (where going outside without protection is now a prescription for freezing to death) in order to study the debris and corpses that are falling out of the sky. He works with a woman named Jeanmarie, who everyone thinks is as cold as the weather outside, and a doctor. There's also a pilot. All four of them are called out to retrieve a new corpse - number Seventeen - that recently dropped. On the way there they argue about the bricks which keep on falling; some seem to be from the bottom of structures, and some from the tops. Well, one guy has the bright idea that these come from ravelins - combat structures where two walls of bricks line up and meet at one corner. In the middle of this exposition we get a chapter called "IRON" (unlike the previous two featuring Fisher, which are calling "ICE") where we see this primitive brickmaker go about his day. He seems to use this "ravelin" structure for hunting - until the "enemy" show up. A bunch of them pour into the valley, and they're built around this one object which I assumed to be a chariot. He runs from them, while back in the "present," Fisher's crew are told that Seventeen is *alive*. Then we go back to "IRON" and see a boatman stalk the newly arrived enemy and get in the middle of something. They shoot their beam-weapon at him and it misses and a chunk of the lake, including his boat, vanishes. In "ICE" we hear Fisher's crazy theory as they move to pick up Seventeen; ."
This theory lines up with the next few doses of "IRON." ...
*Ice & Iron* is an interesting book in terms of what it *wants to* accomplish, but I don't think that what it accomplishes honestly means much. Fiction with multiple plot lines is one of my favorite kinds of fiction, so I should love what tucker's doing here. Maybe I would've if he didn't write like he's holding cards close to his chest and is holding back tantalizing information about the world and how the timelines line up when he isn't holding any crucial knowledge back past page 70; once we hear Fisher's seemingly insane theory about the nature of the strange phenomena, nothing is really said to challenge it or revolutionize upon it. There is no further conceptual breakthrough before the story is over, and not even then. And even if there isn't any further layers of estrangement, Tucker could at least respect us enough to let us know the state of the future and what exactly is going on; ? I don't know the answers to any of those questions, and neither will you. I kind of doubt Tucker knew either; he acted like he didn't. And if you're not going to do something cool and sharp and literary, then the least that you can do is explain your world to us. But there is no explanation, just like a contemporary pop song that doesn't do anything to grow or change itself. This is not a dynamic book, and while Tucker does try to tie some of the IRON bits into ICE through the appearances of Seventeen and Eighteen, their participation in the "main" timeline seems pretty tokenized once Fisher is able to pull a couple thing about them out of his butt through fiendishly clever observations.
Speaking of Fisher and Seventeen and Eighteen, let's talk about characters in this novel. I don't think that they're this novel's strong suite; then again, in writing about this novel, I'm realizing that it doesn't have a strong suite. Fisher is our principal, but his characterization is a bit slippery, just like the mercury that's supposed to be falling throughout the course of this novel. He's a cocky, even arrogant guy who seems great at coming up with theories and he has random, obsessives tendencies, like the one over Jeanmarie. The back of the book says that he spends his days lusting over her, but that's a very crude way to put what happens in the book; I think he might just be bored and in need of another conquest. But behind this wall of bravado there doesn't seem to be anything really there; either Tucker didn't put the time into conceptualizing his full self or didn't write it well enough to reveal it. The side characters aren't great either; Jeanmarie is said to be a lot colder than she actually is, leading us to a weird case of what Tucker is showing versus telling us that seems accidentally contradictory; the pilot is obsessive about his ship's safety but not much else; the doctor is obsessed with getting nurses to help his patient Seventeen but not much else, not even getting back to Mexico where he has a wife and it's warm out. Honestly, maybe part of the theme here is that everyone's obsessed with something, but that doesn't really come through in IRON, not even in the last chapter, and no one really remarkably succeeds in their ambition or is destroyed by it so... is Tucker really trying to telling us something or is he just writing the same character over and over again without knowing it? I'm guessing it's the latter, and yet again, that diminishes the value of this novel.
The third critical paragraph of one of my negative reviews is usually when I say "but it's okay, because these things are good about the book." Unfortunately, although I came into this review with no ill intent, I have to finish talking about this book's flaws. To finish, we'll talk about the logic, and how I don't buy it. First of all, this novel wants to spoof the mysterious phenomena of Charles Fort; animals flying from the sky and everything. But besides name-dropping him, this book does nothing to explain who he was or why his discoveries have any value (kind of like how he fails to explain anything about these worlds he dreams up). As someone who's not familiar with that side of the world, it just seems like namedropping without actual research put in. And the research put into the coming ice age seems... dubious at best. I know that writing this review in the year 2026 means that there are fifty-two more years of scientific discovery at my disposal than Tucker had, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense. Apparently the the glaciers move at sixty-one meters per year, and yet within a hundred years of the book's publication much of Canada is covered in glaciers when it would take roughly 26229.5082 years for glaciers to advance from a city in Nunavat to Winnipeg at that rate... maybe Tucker's research was sound and either my understanding or the way he described Canadian geography was wrong, but the mix of the short turn around time and the glacial projections just made me scratch my head. There's a difference between mass cold sweeping through and glaciers sweeping through, but Tucker was not satisfied to leave things at a cold front. His science fictional logic was strange as well, and those special guns which have to be held to the ground for them to be able to shoot are just nonsensical and have no apparent grounding in logic. As a whole it just feels like a random and slapdash novel; it spends a lot of time crafting a world that never comes into clear focus, spends a lot of time repeating research that Tucker did, closes with an "emotional" character moment after not treating the character as a three-dimensional being but a cocky puzzle solver with no deep emotions... it's just kind of a mess of a book. Tucker ends chapters in a good and page-turning way and finds ways to make you want to keep reading and the way he ties some later IRON chapters into earlier ICE ones makes you think he's going to do something really big and rewarding at the end of the novel, but then he doesn't - I really don't know what else to say to that.
Ultimately, while not badly written or imagined, the fleetness and the amount of holes in basically every major facet of novel-writing here makes me give this a 5/10. It was not unenjoyable at the time and it just feel like clickbait that is ultimately illogical and unrewarding. This isn't going to scare me away from Tucker because I know a lot of people whose opinions I like have good things to say about some of his other works, but they won't be the first books to get out of my literary Purgatory (once I find them)... I don't want to scare you out of reading this, but I also doubt you'll be able to give it an unbiased change after this - I wish you the best of luck. I also wish you the best of luck next winter, and would recommend some better frigidly apocalyptic reads (like *The Long Winter* by John Christopher) if you so choose to go down that route...
*Ice & Iron* starts somewhere in the twenty-first century in a world where global cooling is leading a slate of glaciers on a comeback tour through Canada. Fisher Yann Highsmith lives at a base in a part of Canada (where going outside without protection is now a prescription for freezing to death) in order to study the debris and corpses that are falling out of the sky. He works with a woman named Jeanmarie, who everyone thinks is as cold as the weather outside, and a doctor. There's also a pilot. All four of them are called out to retrieve a new corpse - number Seventeen - that recently dropped. On the way there they argue about the bricks which keep on falling; some seem to be from the bottom of structures, and some from the tops. Well, one guy has the bright idea that these come from ravelins - combat structures where two walls of bricks line up and meet at one corner. In the middle of this exposition we get a chapter called "IRON" (unlike the previous two featuring Fisher, which are calling "ICE") where we see this primitive brickmaker go about his day. He seems to use this "ravelin" structure for hunting - until the "enemy" show up. A bunch of them pour into the valley, and they're built around this one object which I assumed to be a chariot. He runs from them, while back in the "present," Fisher's crew are told that Seventeen is *alive*. Then we go back to "IRON" and see a boatman stalk the newly arrived enemy and get in the middle of something. They shoot their beam-weapon at him and it misses and a chunk of the lake, including his boat, vanishes. In "ICE" we hear Fisher's crazy theory as they move to pick up Seventeen; ."
This theory lines up with the next few doses of "IRON." ...
*Ice & Iron* is an interesting book in terms of what it *wants to* accomplish, but I don't think that what it accomplishes honestly means much. Fiction with multiple plot lines is one of my favorite kinds of fiction, so I should love what tucker's doing here. Maybe I would've if he didn't write like he's holding cards close to his chest and is holding back tantalizing information about the world and how the timelines line up when he isn't holding any crucial knowledge back past page 70; once we hear Fisher's seemingly insane theory about the nature of the strange phenomena, nothing is really said to challenge it or revolutionize upon it. There is no further conceptual breakthrough before the story is over, and not even then. And even if there isn't any further layers of estrangement, Tucker could at least respect us enough to let us know the state of the future and what exactly is going on; ? I don't know the answers to any of those questions, and neither will you. I kind of doubt Tucker knew either; he acted like he didn't. And if you're not going to do something cool and sharp and literary, then the least that you can do is explain your world to us. But there is no explanation, just like a contemporary pop song that doesn't do anything to grow or change itself. This is not a dynamic book, and while Tucker does try to tie some of the IRON bits into ICE through the appearances of Seventeen and Eighteen, their participation in the "main" timeline seems pretty tokenized once Fisher is able to pull a couple thing about them out of his butt through fiendishly clever observations.
Speaking of Fisher and Seventeen and Eighteen, let's talk about characters in this novel. I don't think that they're this novel's strong suite; then again, in writing about this novel, I'm realizing that it doesn't have a strong suite. Fisher is our principal, but his characterization is a bit slippery, just like the mercury that's supposed to be falling throughout the course of this novel. He's a cocky, even arrogant guy who seems great at coming up with theories and he has random, obsessives tendencies, like the one over Jeanmarie. The back of the book says that he spends his days lusting over her, but that's a very crude way to put what happens in the book; I think he might just be bored and in need of another conquest. But behind this wall of bravado there doesn't seem to be anything really there; either Tucker didn't put the time into conceptualizing his full self or didn't write it well enough to reveal it. The side characters aren't great either; Jeanmarie is said to be a lot colder than she actually is, leading us to a weird case of what Tucker is showing versus telling us that seems accidentally contradictory; the pilot is obsessive about his ship's safety but not much else; the doctor is obsessed with getting nurses to help his patient Seventeen but not much else, not even getting back to Mexico where he has a wife and it's warm out. Honestly, maybe part of the theme here is that everyone's obsessed with something, but that doesn't really come through in IRON, not even in the last chapter, and no one really remarkably succeeds in their ambition or is destroyed by it so... is Tucker really trying to telling us something or is he just writing the same character over and over again without knowing it? I'm guessing it's the latter, and yet again, that diminishes the value of this novel.
The third critical paragraph of one of my negative reviews is usually when I say "but it's okay, because these things are good about the book." Unfortunately, although I came into this review with no ill intent, I have to finish talking about this book's flaws. To finish, we'll talk about the logic, and how I don't buy it. First of all, this novel wants to spoof the mysterious phenomena of Charles Fort; animals flying from the sky and everything. But besides name-dropping him, this book does nothing to explain who he was or why his discoveries have any value (kind of like how he fails to explain anything about these worlds he dreams up). As someone who's not familiar with that side of the world, it just seems like namedropping without actual research put in. And the research put into the coming ice age seems... dubious at best. I know that writing this review in the year 2026 means that there are fifty-two more years of scientific discovery at my disposal than Tucker had, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense. Apparently the the glaciers move at sixty-one meters per year, and yet within a hundred years of the book's publication much of Canada is covered in glaciers when it would take roughly 26229.5082 years for glaciers to advance from a city in Nunavat to Winnipeg at that rate... maybe Tucker's research was sound and either my understanding or the way he described Canadian geography was wrong, but the mix of the short turn around time and the glacial projections just made me scratch my head. There's a difference between mass cold sweeping through and glaciers sweeping through, but Tucker was not satisfied to leave things at a cold front. His science fictional logic was strange as well, and those special guns which have to be held to the ground for them to be able to shoot are just nonsensical and have no apparent grounding in logic. As a whole it just feels like a random and slapdash novel; it spends a lot of time crafting a world that never comes into clear focus, spends a lot of time repeating research that Tucker did, closes with an "emotional" character moment after not treating the character as a three-dimensional being but a cocky puzzle solver with no deep emotions... it's just kind of a mess of a book. Tucker ends chapters in a good and page-turning way and finds ways to make you want to keep reading and the way he ties some later IRON chapters into earlier ICE ones makes you think he's going to do something really big and rewarding at the end of the novel, but then he doesn't - I really don't know what else to say to that.
Ultimately, while not badly written or imagined, the fleetness and the amount of holes in basically every major facet of novel-writing here makes me give this a 5/10. It was not unenjoyable at the time and it just feel like clickbait that is ultimately illogical and unrewarding. This isn't going to scare me away from Tucker because I know a lot of people whose opinions I like have good things to say about some of his other works, but they won't be the first books to get out of my literary Purgatory (once I find them)... I don't want to scare you out of reading this, but I also doubt you'll be able to give it an unbiased change after this - I wish you the best of luck. I also wish you the best of luck next winter, and would recommend some better frigidly apocalyptic reads (like *The Long Winter* by John Christopher) if you so choose to go down that route...
October 20, 2025
I’ve read a few of Wilson Tucker’s books, and this is my favourite of them, although it’s a short and slight novel, less ambitious than the others.
Published in 1974, it imagines a not-too-distant future suffering from a new ice age, with glaciers overrunning Canada and threatening the northern United States—which is quaintly amusing, as it’s the reverse of what’s actually happening.
A team of investigators in the very cold zone near the advancing glaciers finds strange objects and human corpses falling intermittently out of thin air, and eventually works out where they must be coming from and why.
What I like about the book:
1. The gradual unfolding and solution of the mystery.
2. The rather unusual and offbeat writing style and characters (in particular the protagonist).
3. The ingenious use of a few elements of past history, woven into this speculative future.
Nothing special happens at the end of the story: it just ends quietly as the mystery is solved (in outline) and the team disperses. But, in the context of this story, I think the ending is satisfactory, and a more exciting finale would seem out of place.
The story is implausible in various ways (not just the ice age!), but I don’t find that a problem. Just think of it as a quirky fantasy, and press on.
However, the short penultimate chapter is implausible in terms of human behaviour: it seems to show primitive hunter-gatherers behaving in a way that they wouldn’t. I don’t see the point of this chapter: it contributes nothing useful to the book, and could be omitted.
Published in 1974, it imagines a not-too-distant future suffering from a new ice age, with glaciers overrunning Canada and threatening the northern United States—which is quaintly amusing, as it’s the reverse of what’s actually happening.
A team of investigators in the very cold zone near the advancing glaciers finds strange objects and human corpses falling intermittently out of thin air, and eventually works out where they must be coming from and why.
What I like about the book:
1. The gradual unfolding and solution of the mystery.
2. The rather unusual and offbeat writing style and characters (in particular the protagonist).
3. The ingenious use of a few elements of past history, woven into this speculative future.
Nothing special happens at the end of the story: it just ends quietly as the mystery is solved (in outline) and the team disperses. But, in the context of this story, I think the ending is satisfactory, and a more exciting finale would seem out of place.
The story is implausible in various ways (not just the ice age!), but I don’t find that a problem. Just think of it as a quirky fantasy, and press on.
However, the short penultimate chapter is implausible in terms of human behaviour: it seems to show primitive hunter-gatherers behaving in a way that they wouldn’t. I don’t see the point of this chapter: it contributes nothing useful to the book, and could be omitted.
May 19, 2018
This was good, but not as good as it could have been. The story moved extremely slowly at first and then picked up near the end. Nothing was really resolved, so the whole impact was of a not very interesting mystery, solved in a relatively uninteresting fashion, while no one falls in love. The characters were pretty well written, although the dialogue had some odd tics. I wasn't sure if the author was intending that the future North Americans dealing with the impending ice age just had a different vernacular to our own, but it was an inefficient and disconcerting way to write dialogue that made the characters seem less real. However, the idea of a new ice sheet grinding south over Canada is a fantastic premise and I would like to read more sci fi set in such a world.
August 6, 2020
It has been many years since I read a Wilson Tucker novel, one of my favorite authors in teenage science fiction years. This one is set at a time in the future when a new Ice Age has brought glaciers that have buried Canada and are creeping across the border into the northern tier of U.S. states. A team of scientists measuring the glide of the glacier is perplexed by bodies and debris that seemingly fall from the sky for no apparent reason or source. The bodies appear to be primitive people. Drawing from the research of Charles Fort, chronicler of the unexplained for many years, we get a tale of apparently parallel universes. It was an engaging enough story, but did not hold me like some of Tucker's other works such as The Year of the Quiet Sun.
February 26, 2009
Men in the far future develop a technological weapon that entirely eliminates the body. Bodies vanish with no energy shed like they were burned. The weapon actually shifts the mass to another point in the universe, into the past, so there is no loss of energy to the whole universe. While the technology is exotic the culture is primitive and uses the weapon with no thought to its consequences because they do not understand the concept of thermodynamics or the conservation of energy.
In the story's past, our (1973) near future, Earth has entered a new ice age. Scientists researching the leading edge of the glacier are finding the field of debris the weapon is leaving.
In the story's past, our (1973) near future, Earth has entered a new ice age. Scientists researching the leading edge of the glacier are finding the field of debris the weapon is leaving.
March 30, 2024
An intriguing idea, mixing Fortean events with hard science. The problem with Ice and Iron is that the sub plot involving the protagonist and a fellow scientist gets in the way of the story at inopportune moments. The novel is peopled with odd characters who never really connect with the overarching plot. I was disappointed that Tucker never really gives us insight into the world of the future he depicts. Then there's that ending, or, should I say, lack of one. I liked the book, but it could have been so much better.
June 17, 2018
Romanzo strano, con molto non spiegato e poco credibile (nel senso che la sospensione dell'incredulità non riesce ad attivarsi più di tanto) ma con dei punti di forza nella scorrevolezza della storia e nell'atmosfera. Due stelle e mezza abbondanti.
September 19, 2020
As Earth copes with a new Ice Age, a team of research scientists are bombarded with artifacts from another civilization. A Science Fiction Book Club selection.
March 18, 2021
It's a quick read, an intriguing tale, a few issues with the writing but those are probably personal. It's unique, enjoyable.
April 30, 2025
An interesting story but no real ending.
March 3, 2026
Read this one years ago. Fascinating and subtle time story. It's also the reason I know what kames and drumlins are. Extremely underrated. Would recommend.
November 4, 2025
Deux histoires autour du temps, la première est plus intéressante
August 6, 2014
I've been doing GoodReads reviews on both ends, covering books as they're finished and working from lists of books completed that have been maintained since 1974, occasionally going back even further from memory and in reference to a bibliographical cardfile maintained since 1970/71 or so. So doing, I began by favoring serious literature and non-fiction books. I have recently tried to include more science fiction novels and collections as they constitute so very much of the reading actually performed, particularly during breaks from school and during childhood. It is sobering to see how many hundreds, thousands of these things I read, sometimes more than one being consumed in a day, and how little I remember of most of them. There are, thank heavens, a few exceptions, but not many.
Tucker's Ice and Iron is not an exception. Seeing the cover of the book club edition I read brings it back, but only vaguely, as a novel enjoyed during the hours of its consumption.
Tucker's Ice and Iron is not an exception. Seeing the cover of the book club edition I read brings it back, but only vaguely, as a novel enjoyed during the hours of its consumption.
July 24, 2019
The time might well be today in this intriguing science fiction tale in which the vagaries of weather open the door to an unknown civilization from the past - or is it the future? Across the globe a new ice age is encroaching. From Alberta to Ontario most of Canada is deserted, its people resettled in the southern United States and Mexico, while mile by mile, century by century, the glacier grinds down their former homes. Fisher Yann Highsmith is a scientist stationed, with a few colleagues, on the edge of the ice field, recording its relentless growth and the destruction of life in its path. In the midst of this barren landscape the team recovers a weird assortment of artifacts that seem to appear suddenly out of thin air, and Highsmith fits them together into a fantastic theory of another dimension. Then the search parties begin to find bodies out of time and place and Highsmith's history of parallel worlds becomes a chilling reality.
November 14, 2015
I found my opinion changing greatly during the reading of Iron & Ice. At first I really liked the chapters revolving around Fisherman. And I found myself struggling through the chapters in the far future with the primitive people. By the end of the book, I was looking more forward to the far future chapters as only they could explain why these objects were falling. The change came because I guess that I found Fisherman to be pretty obstinate in his opinion and not open at all to other possibilities. To me, he isn't a very good scientist.
Overall, I found Iron & Ice to be pretty good, but I never formed any link to any of the main characters. The scenario the Wilson Tucker has created is interesting and could happen someday. After all, someday the ice will return and cover part of the United States. Where will man go and what will happen? Who can say?
Mr. Tucker gives us a glimpse into his version of the distant future right here on Earth.
I rated this book a 6 out of 10.
Overall, I found Iron & Ice to be pretty good, but I never formed any link to any of the main characters. The scenario the Wilson Tucker has created is interesting and could happen someday. After all, someday the ice will return and cover part of the United States. Where will man go and what will happen? Who can say?
Mr. Tucker gives us a glimpse into his version of the distant future right here on Earth.
I rated this book a 6 out of 10.
September 22, 2008
This books mixes SF and fantasy well. A new ice age strikes, and weird things begin to appear suggesting another, parallel universe. The idea is great, the story is not quite as strong as the idea. But together they work pretty well.
December 28, 2011
This is probably one of the worse books I ever read. Normally I put the book down when they are this bad, but I didn't think it could get any worse. I was wrong
April 27, 2014
Silly little book. Almost awesome. It was missing something, I'm not sure exactly what. Enjoyable but not worth much comment.
Read
October 22, 2014A new ice age has encompassed the world. Stationed at the edge of the southward moving glacier scientists observe the decline of human culture as the ice creeps southward.
May 29, 2015
1987 grade B-
Hardcover
Hardcover
December 12, 2024
"Já jsem si přišel hrát s kamením"
c-on-deck-audio-and-ebooks
January 11, 2019Cover by Laszlo Kubinyi. If there are interior illustrations, edit book description.
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