MOONRISE

Last entry in the Snowfall Trilogy featuring realistic fantasy, military-based cultures, and Smith’s power of immediacy with people, sense of place, detail, and sensory presence.

In Snowfall (2002), a future Ice Age builds a mile-high wall of ice across the northern states from coast to coast, with only the tips of a few skyscrapers rising above the ice. Jack Monroe and the Trappers lose their Range when a band of Crees massacres them, the Crees themselves being driven from their homeland by other marauders. In Kingdom River (2003), the man-against-nature theme fades before the history of clans warring for arable land. Jack Monroe’s son Sam leads an army of warrior folk who live between Mexico City and northern Mexico. Then come the Khanate nomads led by Toghrul Khan, who have crossed northern ice from Russia and conquered the West. Monroe bands with Queen Joan of big Kingdom River, along the Mississippi, marries Joan’s daughter, Princess Rachel, and together the two rebuff Khan, although now in New England a psychic folk is mastering human bird-flight. Twenty years later, in Moonrise, King Sam and Queen Rachel, who have ruled in peace, die when their ship founders in the Gulf Entire. Their son, the Crown Prince Newton, is murdered, and Bajazet, his adopted brother and the son of Toghrul, finds himself battered about by varied tribesmen fighting the New England psychics—and weird, carnivorous, huge, four-legged half-human creatures that eat men. Pursued, Bajazet is taken in by the Moonrisers, Made-folk from Boston who rise at night, and he joins their flight north. Will he have a romance with the Made fox-girl Nancy? What of bewinged Patience who Walks-in-air? The trilogy at last returns to the great Wall and the vertical terrors of ice-climbing. Baj and the Made-people must face the ringing bells of the Boston-town regiments before Baj and Nancy and their friends set sail from Boston harbor for Europe.

A terrific fulfillment. Charmed fans will relish it.