“The Ice War” is related to Stephen Baxter’s 1993 novel Anti-Ice, which was his first major attempt at alternate history. He recently completed his Time’s Tapestry alternate history series for Ace, with the fourth book, Weaver. He tells us he enjoys AH so much that this year he’s serving as a judge on the Sidewise Award. Stephen’s next project is a two-book sequence of climate and disaster called Flood and Ark; Flood has just come out from Gollancz in the United Kingdom.
The historians have painted March fifth 1720 as a day of infamy, for that was the day the Ice War was declared upon Britain by monsters from the sky. But my own poor life might have ended that ominous morn even before the war’s tremendous events began to unfold.
As I lay in my narrow bed in that dawn, Fred Partridge’s voice drifted up to me from the chill road outside. “Jack Hobbes! I know you are up there, you blackguard. If you’re alone in your pit or if you’re not, come down and face your justice like a man!” All this to a counterpoint of a hammering on the tavern door by mighty agricultural fists.
My immediate stratagem was to follow that course that has served me so well throughout my life, that is to hide until the danger had passed. So I burrowed under the coarse sheets, pulling my jerkin tighter around me and my battered old felt hat down upon my ears, for in that spring the cold would freeze the marrow in your bones, and I kept on layers of clothes even during the night. I could guess why Fred was there, but even in that moment of peril I wished I had his daughter in the bed beside me again: full-breasted, empty-headed, sixteen years old, what a bedwarmer Verity had made!
