Back in 1998 (or thereabouts, the past is hazy) I picked up a random book from Akateeminen.
Matt Reilly‘s Ice Station was such a roller-coaster of a techno-thriller that I kept n pushing it to anybody even remotely interested in the genre. And like mine, their reception was enthusiastic, this was definitely a book head and shoulders above the common fare.
Ice Station has had three sequels. The newest one (Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves) was just published in paperback, and I decided to re-read the series before plunging into the latest installment.
The pacing is relentless, peril a constant companion, bad guys killed by a dozen, good guys not arbitrarily spared either, and massively overpowered cliffhangers encountered pretty much every eighty pages or so. The setting, an eponymous research station in Antarctica is well-realized (and the maps at the beginning of the book do come in useful).
The characters are slightly more than cardboard cutouts, and a lot of the story is just a vehicle to showcase futuristic military hardware.
But even worse is the author’s voice: the text is peppered by italicized sound effects, the dialogue distilled from a couple of decades wort of action movies.
So this is clearly not for everybody.
But those able to deal with the avalanche-style ride of the Ice Stations are rewarded with +d6 points in Special Forces-lore.
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