The Ice Schooner

When Captain Konrad Arflame rescues an old man on the ice, he little realizes that it will begin him on a journey to where he never thought he would go. The Earth is wrapped in a shell ice, and life is only given to those hard enough and tough enough to hold it. So, when the old man provides Arflame with an ice-schooner to captain, and a mission to find the fabled lost city of New York, he embraces it as a chance to redeem himself and strengthen his slowly eroding faith. But, along the way, Captain Arflame finds out more than he likes about himself and his world...much more. I must say that I really enjoyed this book. The author, a giant in the sci-fi genre, did a great job of creating a very interesting setting, and then peopling it with very interesting characters. I liked the ice-ships with their ski-like runners, the fierce land whales, and the underground/under-ice cities. And, I thought found the characters to all be quite interesting. So, if you are interested in a great story set in a unique setting, then I highly recommend Ice Schooner by Michael Moorcock. It's well worth your reading time.

So far the only things I've read from Moorcock are this and a short story from him which I don't remember the title of that was collected in The Space Opera Renaissance anthology. So I don't know if this is typical of Moorcock, but both characters were such big savage macho men that it was almost funny. Even though this novel was written in the 1960s it has a really archaic sound to it. Nevertheless, Moorcock's world-building and plot are very imaginative and enjoyable. I Read this while helping a professor do field research in the jungle; being under conditions of privation enhanced my imagination of Konrad Arflane and co. sailing across the icy wasteland of post-apocalyptic Earth. Also, a geeky reference: in this universe, like in Frank Herbert's Dune universe, whales that have fur exist.

Michael Moorcock, The Ice Schooner (Berkley, 1966)Michael Moorcock is a singularly prolific writer; the number of novels and short stories that has flowed from the man's pen is almost unforgivable. Over the course of the last twenty years, I've read roughly a hundred of Moorcock's novels, maybe half again the same number of short stories. So when I say that The Ice Schooner may be Moorcock's finest hour, take it with as much salt as necessary, given that I've read such a small amount of his output.The Ice Schooner is Moorcock's high-fantasy retelling of Moby Dick, but without the two-hundred-odd-page "how to kill, skin, and eat a whale" interruption in Melville's bloated tome. Actually, it's not so much a retelling (as was, say, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres a retelling of King Lear) as it is a retooling. Instead of a big whale, Konrad Arflane, the book's main character, is on a quest to find the ancient, legendary city of New York. (One wonders if Pierre Boulle read this in the year between its publication and his writing of Planet of the Apes.) The quest comes not from his obsession with the city, but with another's obsession. But still, when it comes right down to it, Arflane and Ahab are more similar than just in name. Certain supporting characters are also recognizable (the similarities run deeper than name, too, in Urquart and Queequeg, and dandyish Manfred has more than a bit of Ishmael about him). The conscious warping of Moby Dick alone would be enough to make this novel stand out with the litt-rat-chaw crowd, where most of Moorcock's stuff is so easily dismissed by most of them. But it's also romance in the finest sense of the word, as the word was used back in the days when Melville was writing. Burly whalemen putting their lives in danger every time they harpoon a whale (and whales do get harpooned here, though not in the living detail rendered them by Melville), star-crossed lovers, and Manfred in the middle of it all, happy to be adventuring, despite (or perhaps because of) the adventure's possibly fatal nature.A word on the star-crossed lovers. Moorcock has a long tradition in his novels of the traditional love story; even when things look bleakest for his protagonists, their lovers are beacons of hope, no matter how distant. He turns his (and romance's) convention on its head in this novel; from the moment the two lovers are introduced to one another, the air of foreboding in the novel palpably thickens. You know as well as they do things are not going to turn out right for the two of them. For the veteran reader of Moorcock, this is a refreshing change from the norm, especially in the Eternal Champion novels. (Moorcock neophytes may take a different view, as this particular pair of star-crossed lovers is of the most traditional sort: adulterers. And, as we all know, adulterers can never get away with it.)The one failing the book has is in its ending. The book was originally serialized in a magazine, which may account for the rat

When you want to sit down with a great tale and become fully engrossed in a different land, this is the book for you