Ice Age 4000
Eiszeit 4000 (OT: The Ice Schooner) is a science fiction novel by the author Michael Moorcock, originally published by Berkley in 1969 and a German translation in 1970. The novel does not make use of the connection to the characters of the "Eternal Heroes" cycles, which is otherwise frequent in Moorcock; nevertheless it was published in 1993 in the Moorcock series "The Eternal Champion" together with the novels The Black Corridor and The Distant Suns in the anthology "Sailing to Utopia".
action
The earth is covered by a thick layer of ice; the well-known civilization is on the Matto Grosso plateau, where eight cities compete with each other on the ice in search of giant ice whales, known by whalers as fish. Captain Konrad Arflane, 35, a stubborn man who strongly builds on traditional ideas such as the belief in the "mother of ice" and the coming death of the world in ice, is no longer in command; his town, Brershill, is currently on the downturn. Undecided, he goes out onto the ice to see his fate. On the ice he meets an old man who, crawling over the ice with the last of his strength, tries to reach his hometown, Friesgalt. According to the code of honor of his culture, Arflane is not obliged to help the man; touched by his strong will to live, he does it anyway and brings Lord Pyotr Rorsefne, the actual ruler of Friesgalt, back to his city.
There he meets a few other people: the Lord's children, the ironic Manfred Friesgalt and the beautiful Ulrika Ulsenn, with whom he falls in love, although she is married to the unloved but rich Janek Ulsenn, and the mysterious Urquart, the best harpooner of the eight cities and a mystic of the ice mother, also an illegitimate and therefore not accepted child of Lord Rorsefene.
Soon Lord Rorsefne dies; but first he instructs Arflane to search for the city of New York using his maps; He too had been looking for this mythical place when his skid-mounted ship wrecked. Arflane accepts the order; Manfred and Ulrika are also supposed to go on a search with him on the Ice Spirit, the best ship in town; but Janek, who is unsympathetic to Arflane, also goes on the trip.
On the way, Janek tries again and again to instigate a mutiny; Finally, the Ice Spirit breaks down, but close to the destination, the expedition sets off for New York. Soon they are captured by barbarians who, under the guidance of Urquart, want to offer the blood of two nobles - Manfred and Ulrika - to the ice mother in order to appease her. Arflane defends himself against fate, whereby both Urquart and Manfred perish; thus the blood of two nobles was offered as an offering. The barbarians move on with the expedition.
New York does not turn out to be the home of the Ice Mother; on the contrary, the place emits an uncomfortable warmth. The ice also gives way to a different, transparent material. The barbarians rebel and want to kill Arflane, incited by Janek. He murders Janek and escapes to the strange city with Ulrika.
There it becomes clear that after a nuclear disaster and a subsequent nuclear winter, mankind took two paths of development - that of the ice people, who forgot the knowledge of mankind and adapted to the harsh ice world, and that of the New Yorkers, who long lived in an underground city Pol lived and now use their technology to initiate a warming and transformation of the planet.
The New Yorkers, represented by Ballantine, a soft and overgrown person with an oversized head for Arflane's feelings, ask Arflane and Ulrika to prepare the people of their world for the coming changes. Ulrika is fascinated by the new possibilities, but Arflane refuses. He understands that through his love for Ulrika and the forward-looking thinking of her family he has turned away from his being and decides to travel further north on his own in search of the ice mother.
Reaction and issues
The novel is often considered one of Michael Moorcock's less successful individual works; Moorcock himself wrote The Ice Schooner as a classic adventure story after he had met with little approval from the publishing houses when his experimental work Miss Brunner's Last Program was released. The work takes on some elements from Melville's classic Moby Dick, but basically tells of the difference between traditional ways of thinking that are due to the harshness of the struggle for survival and future-oriented, world-changing approaches.
expenditure
- The Ice Schooner, 1969, Berkeley
- The Ice Schooner, 1977, HarperCollins, ISBN 0060130067
- Ice Age 4000, 1970, ISBN 3-814-70011-2
- Sailing to Utopia (anthology), 1993, White Wolf Publishing, ISBN 1-85798-031-X