SNOWFALL

Rousing and well-written tale of a future Ice Age. Most traces of our civilization have vanished, and a mile-high Wall of ice stretches across the northern states from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This has resulted from comets and comet fragments striking Jupiter in 1998, shifting that planet’s orbit, in turn shifting ours. In Chicago, only the tops of a few skyscrapers rise above the ice, their interiors scavenged by Indians for metals for weapons, steel runners for dog sleds, and so on. The little remaining culture is carried on by copying copies of copies of ancient texts by Aymond Chandler, Rand McNally, and songbooks full of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” “Mazy Dotes” and “Chatta Choo Choo”—the recopying having degraded the long-lost originals. Jack Monroe, because he killed an Olsen who was beating his wife, has been cast out of the Trappers, who live on the Range on the Wall. Six years later, Jack saves a trapping party from a band of Crees, then returns to the Range with the party, even though the remaining Olsens must, by law, execute him. And he is loved by the tribe’s doctor, Catania Olsen, whose jagged facial scar has kept her from marriage. A war party of Trappers kills over a hundred Crees, but an even larger group of Crees attacks them and slaughters the Range. The Crees have lost their own territory to a very large tribe moving in from the east, so now they must have the Range. Jack leads the 46 remaining Trappers to the forest below the Wall, the while being chased by a Cree party intent on massacring them. In the forest, the Trappers are taken in by a forest civilization, the Garden, that builds houses high in the trees and grows vegetables the Trappers have never seen. But the Trappers, moving on, face fatal dangers.

Smith’s best since Stone City (1990), deserving a large audience.