The Terror

by Dan Simmons

So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go? And more pertinent to the central question, why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

“Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned. “It seems it is shorter for those who steal from their mates.”