Snowfall: Book One of the Snowfall Trilogy

Set in the future after the next ice age has destroyed most of civilization, this is a story about Dr. Catania Olsen a member of the Trappers tribe, a group by people living in the North at the edge of the glacial wall. Enough time has passed so that most knowledge has been lost. Civilization is still on the fall. It is a brutal time and life is very hard. Catania's tribe is attacked and forced to move. The tribe meets the Garden people, which live in the forest. There Catania meets the rather extreme one-eyed doctor. Catania must tread carefully with the half-mad woman. I enjoyed this story. It is creative and well thought out. We are not presented a world where humanity bravely steps up to and overcomes a challenge, but where it descends back into darkness and merely strives for survival. An interesting story.

The next Ice Age is upon us: imagine the mile-high cliff of ice at your back, with the Rocky Mountains another impenetrable wall of ice to the west, & people from the east, who once occasionally hunted peaceably on the periphery of your territory, are now intent on taking over your traplines & your caves. Where do you go? Into the great, green forest to the South where the snow ends & monsters dwell?Mitchell Smith has created a whole new future, with particular attention to the anthropological aspects of how we might have made it, what things & thoughts might have survived from the Warm Time.I particularly enjoyed the fully realized heroines & heroes, those who die & those who survive. They have keen insights & eyesights that we, today in our citified lethargy, have long since discarded. Each person could have walked in today's world & felt a glimmer of recognition for us modern folks & our modern nation, except...SNOWFALL is a marvelous, richly-textured adventure that allows us a glimpse of what really might happen when our descendants have to grapple with the inevitable change in the Earth's climate. What will happen to Chicago, for instance, when thousands of feet of snow bury the city? What will happen to our store of knowledge, once electricity is no more? What will happen to our society? Who then will be the readers of what books? What will the doctors know? Who will be our leaders? What kinds of relationships will we have?If you read only one science-fiction/anthropology book this year, read SNOWFALL! Mitchell Smith has written a superb survivalist saga, that lingers in your mind everafter, wondering. It certainly deserves a sequel, for I would dearly love to know how Catania makes it to the Sierras & the snow-bound warrior/hunters who live there.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one hand, it has a pretty neat premise: The impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994 perturbed that planet's orbit imperceptibly, yet just enough to cause gradual climatic change on Earth, and hundreds of years later we are in the grip of a new Ice Age. Cool idea! Yet I'm troubled by the fact that such climate change would necessarily result in the catastrophic setback of science and culture depicted in this book. If the climate change had been accompanied by, for instance, a few good meteor impacts, the tribal existence of the book's protagonists would have been far more plausible. Too many questions are left unanswered here, and "Snowfall" is left begging for a sequel.That having been said, I still found this novel quite entertaining. I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic sci-fi, although there is precious little sci-fi here. Instead Mitchell Smith has painted a rich picture of a tribal community that calls itself the Trappers, living a tooth-and-nail existence just below the Wall Of Ice that engulfed Canada and the northern half of the United States. Having been forced off their land by tribes that have in turn been forced off THEIR land, the remnants of the Trappers must move south to warmer climes and strange human cultures. There are some memorable, well-drawn characters in this tale, most notably Catania, the tribe's doctor and preserver of ancient medical knowledge. Tribal warfare, sickness and death are portrayed unflinchingly here. The book is divided into short, easily digested chapters, each beginning with an excerpt from Catania's journal. Definitely worth a look if you like books of this genre.

In 1998, humanity learned a cold hard lesson about the interrelationship of the solar system. Comets and fragments hammered Jupiter causing a minute, seemingly statistically insignificant shift in the giant planet's orbit. Insignificant to Jupiter turns out to be colossal to Earth as that almost undetectable shift over two hundred years later has caused a monstrous new ice age on the earth. This wall of ice is so big that almost all of Chicago is buried under it and so wide the North America continent is divided in two. Clans barter, fight, and compete for supremacy in a harsh land. For instance, the Trappers are hunters with some knowledge of the past eke a living in the frozen Colorado Mountains. When barbaric invaders from the north attack, the Trappers flee led by Jack Monroe and Dr. Catania Olsen to the south. They seek peace and domestic tranquilly, but only find a vast wasteland of savageness. Still they keep searching for a better life. SNOWFALL is a great apocalypse tale that uses a real solar event to cause an incredible catastrophe on earth that leads to a deep tale of future survival. The story line is very exciting, as the action never slows down yet readers care about the Trappers, especially the lead duo, whose struggles seem so real. Fans of future dark global calamities will want to revise their short term reading plan by placing Mitchell Smith's tremendous thriller at the top of the to read immediately food chain.Harriet Klausner