Burning the Ice

More than a hundred years after a small band of humans stole an antimatter-fueled starship and headed away at near-lightspeed, a colony of those renegades' descendants are now struggling to survive on Brimstone, a barely-habitable world of ice and bitter cold four dozen light-years from Earth.

In the long run, they hope to slowly terraform Brimstone, making it, if not Earthlike, at least bearable. In the short run-well, life is hard, and everyone lives in everyone else's laps. Not easy for anyone. Particularly hard if, like Manda, you just aren't cut out to get along with others in conditions of constant crowding and zero privacy.

Most people wouldn't be eager to get away from the main colony and work on a scientific project in the howling frozen wastes. For Manda, it's a deliverance. But news of the intelligent life she discovers in Brimstone's depths will change everything-if she can bring the news back to her fellows alive. For, it turns out, there are political plots and counterplots still active in the colony, dangerous twists tracing back to Earth itself...and outward to the stars.

From Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

In this gripping and ingenious SF novel, Mixon (Astro Pilots) takes us some two centuries from now to Brimstone, a planet many light-years from Earth and settled by clones from the starship Exodus, who are trying to terraform the ice-covered world. In the forefront of this effort is Manda, a singleton (one whose cloned twin is dead), restless, inquiring and by local standards something of a sociopath. Enter a rockfall that kills the rest of her siblings and threatens to wipe out the colony from starvation. Also enter one Jim LuisMichael, friend, ally, lover and fellow explorer of the remote reaches of Brimstone. There Jim and Manda discover intelligent alien life, in the form of a gigantic organic computer, as well as a deadly plot against both the aliens and Brimstone by the remaining Exodus crew members. To keep the terraforming going, the "croche-born" in space are prepared to destroy the aliens, whom Jim and Manda foil at nearly the cost of their own lives. Then only a split in the croche-born's ranks and the heroic resistance of the colonists keep the croche-born from winning an outright war. While hardly short of action or fascinating scenes of alien contact, the novel's real strength lies in the author's depiction of the future society, with its complex system of degrees of kinship, social obligations and controls, sexual mores and even appropriate pronouns. The ending may be a little rushed, but the vivid storytelling and a high level of imagination mark this as perhaps Mixon's best work to date.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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