STONE FEVER

An unlikely group of teammates hunts for a precious metal in a climate-ravaged future era.

As this first entry of Westhoff’s SF series gets underway, readers are introduced to Joaquin Beltran and Luz Hogarth, two young members of a horse-wrangling tribe of nomadic Onwei people contending with the resource-deprived world of 24th-century ice-free Antarctica. The primitive pattern of their existence is interrupted when a scientific party from the outside world (the “Sky-Bornes,” in tribal parlance) crash-lands on nearby Mount Erebus. This expedition, financed by a duplicitous oligarch, has been sent in search of the precious metal iridium. The novel’s main narrative strand follows the adventures of Canadian geologist Keltyn SparrowHawk, one team member, as she comes to know Luz and Joaquin and their people. The tribe has its own uses for iridium, and various internal treacheries and outside forces may be manipulating both groups toward unknown ends. The story that gradually unfolds is predominantly a detailed study of the inner workings of a tribal society that has fallen away from the increasingly insular technological world. Westhoff orchestrates this fairly standard SF quest plot with a great deal of narrative skill. By cannily adapting the usual SF first-contact idea to a Balkanized future in which resource scarcity has advanced societies sharing the planet with Iron Age nomadic tribes, he’s able to forego a good deal of the worldbuilding that can make such narratives tedious. Instead, he’s very adept at keeping his main characters distinct and individually compelling. The differences between the explorers and the tribe members are shown to run much deeper than their respective levels of technology, and both depictions are refreshingly free of condescension. Keltyn’s slow integration into this tribal setting, although it seems too pat at times, ultimately comes across as convincingly human. Readers finishing this first installment will very likely want to read another.

A gripping and well-constructed tale of first contact in a future Antarctica.