Start Reading Iron Winter (Northland, #3) Engineered By Stephen Baxter Formatted As Bound Copy

concluding volume of the Northland trilogy is a triumph of the meticulous, characterdriven, detailrich worldbuilding that Stephen Baxter has perfected in his 'future history' sequences.
Despite the grim subject matter the advent of a new Ice Age that destroys a nascent civilisation this is a joyous, albeit violent although not nearly as dystopian as the thoroughly distasteful Bronze Summer tale of human triumph and ingenuity in the face of immense adversity.
. . the ending is paradoxically uplifting and heartbreakingly bleak, Baxter has immense insight into, and love for, his diverse band of characters, but does not balk at wielding the hand of fate, Hugely enjoyable, meticulously researched and unerringly paced, this is one of Baxter's finest concluding volumes ever which has generated some widely divergent reviews, I regard him as simply one of the best practitioners of speculative fiction at work today, and one of my favourite writers of any genre.
The third installment in the Stephen Baxter's Northland series sees us in the yearAD of our parallel Earth, The ice continues to advance, bringing impending doom to the Northland and the rest of civilization,

Iron Winter tells the story of the oncoming of an ice age and how it might be dealt with by surviving societies of the time.
Included in this book are tales of discovery, war, disaster and hope,

Unfortunately Iron Winter wasn't as interesting to me as the first two books in the series, seemingly more far fetched and not as well thought out.
Suppositions take huge leaps over logic,

Finally, this is not a true trilogy as it feels like just one more installment in an ongoing narrative, As such is fails to satisfy,

Once again, reading the Afterword is a must for context, I feel that Stephen Baxter could have easily linked the "precocious" advances in technology i, e. steam engines, firedrug, etc with the lack of a Dark Ages and several contiguous long lived societies but failed to do so in his Afterword,

The series is interesting enough to me to keep following any subsequent releases, but this was not my favorite book in the series thus far although still readable to say the least.
It is. And darkness is falling

Many generations ago the Wall was first built to hold back the sea, Northland, a country of fertile plains and ancient forests rescued from the ocean, has become a thriving civilisation based on trade, technology and tradition, centred on the ancient home of the first builders, Etxelur.
The whole of Europe, spanned by the Northlanders' steam caravan lines, has been changed in ways that could never have been predicted,

But nothing can last forever, not even the Wall, The weather is changing, growing colder, and in the wake of the long winters come famine, destruction and terror, And as whole nations are forced out of their lands and head for warmer climes, it seems that even Northland may not be able to endure.


But there is one man, an elderly scholar, who believes he can calculate why the world is cooling, and perhaps even salvage some scraps of the great civilisation of Etxelur.
As he embarks on his grand quest across the world, as nations struggle for survival and the fires of war burn in the gloom, only one thing is certain.


The Ice is coming,

Stephen Baxter's epic series of a changed world reaches its chilling conclusion as the medieval world fights for survival in the cold of a winter without end.
This novel kept me interested, It follows several character sets in various parts of a world that is about to suffer the next Ice Age, It focuses primarily on Northland, a country that does not support farming, The plot inevitably leads through longer and longer winters with very few aware of the big picture, It did seem a bit repetitive in the middle, Some of the characters portrayed were a bit on the cliche side, In general, it is an interesting take on an alternative history, Im. Teil von Stephen Baxters NordlandTrilogie geht die Welt unter, in seinem, Jahrhundert kehrt die Eiszeit zurück und es beginnt das große Sterben, . .
Nordland ist seit Jahrtausende die zivilisierte Welt, deren Handelsrouten bis nach Südamerika, Afrika und China reicht, Der nordländische Wissenschaftler Pyxeas macht sich auf die Reise nach Kathei China ziemlich genau die Route, die Marco Polo in unserer Realität unternahm, um dem Geheimnis der kommenden Eiszeit auf die Spur zu kommen.

Parallel trifft es das Nordland, hinter der riesigen Mauer besonders schlimm, es gibt keine Sommer mehr und der Winter naht nicht nur, es kommt mit Macht.
Die Zivilisationen der Hethiter und der Karthager brechen zusammen, weil die Klimaveränderungen große Hungersnöte hervorrufen und die Völker in Bewegung setzen, um an Nahrung heranzukommen, so zerstört der Krieg das, was von der Welt noch übrig ist.
. .
Baxter gelingt es ziemlich schonungslos und dramatisch, die Klimaveränderung zu schildern, die von Menschen hervorrgerufen wird auch hier ist nach Pyxeas Forschungen, der Mensch schuld am Klimawandel, durch die intensive Landwirtschaft etc.
pp. .
So ist diese Trilogie nichts anderes als ein Spiegel zu unserer eigenen Realität, der Aufstieg und Untergang der Zivilisation, . .
Ein düsteres Ende, wie es Baxter schon so viele Male in seinen Werken geschildert hat, . . You know that feeling you get, anticipating Christmas morning, expecting a certain gift, pretty much sure that you're gonna get what you ask for, only to be severely disappointed when you finally get to unwrap that present and discover it isn't what you asked for Well, "Iron Winter" is kind of like that.


I've been an on again/off again fan of Baxter for years, I flew through "Moonseed" and "Titan" when I was still in high school, I couldn't get enough of the "Flood" and "Ark" series and wish Baxter would write at least one more novel in that universe, and then, even though I'm not one to really like alternate history kind of books, I found myself actually enjoying the Northland Trilogy.
It was different, and way outside my typical genres of reading material, but just as he had done before Baxter roped me in with a compelling saga, full of interesting characters and settings and an original series of speculative fiction.
The firstbooks in the trilogy weren't perfect I rated them bothout ofstars, yet they were fun and I definitely felt like I had made a good decision in giving something new a try.


That's probably why I hated "Iron Winter" so much, While Both "Stone Spring" and "Bronze Summer" were exciting and interesting, "Winter" was just flat out boring! Gone are the battle scenes, Gone are the good stories, The characters that were so compelling and fun are absent, Instead, what you get ispages of people you don't care about, wondering around in a cold, blighted wasteland, talking and boring the hell out of you.
They never really go anywhere well, they travel, but it's a slow, plodding trek that makes the hours crawl along and they never really solve any of their problems.
It got the point where, withpages left,ball I wanted to do was get to the end of this book, so I could go on to something new.


Going back to my opening paragraph, . . I honestly was excited about this book, I thought there would be closure here, That Baxter would come roaring to the finish line and complete his trilogy in style, Obviously, he didn't. Maybe it's just me, but the conclusions to the last few trilogies have been severely lacking, First there was "Mockingjay" didn't like it, Then there was Follett's "Edge of Eternity", And now there's this. Am I expecting too much out of authors these days Or are they just tired of their creations so they hurry to finish Either way, I was less than thrilled with the ending to the Northland trilogy.
Maybe Baxter would do well to stay in the sciti/disaster realm, I havent read a great deal of Alternate History type novels, and when I started this series I didnt realise that it would evolve into this

genre.
What started with one woman trying to save her home from the rising sea in Stone Age Doggerland Northland or Etxelur in the novels the now drowned strip of land bridging England and France the series has taken us on a journey through a very different past.
This latest novel takes place in, The wall, an epic and now ancient construction keeping the sea from consuming Northland, still houses the people of Etxelur, their advanced society and their longremembered history.
But the age of Northlands position as the navel of the world is about to come to an end with the coming of the ice a global cooling that is set to change the course of history again.


I really admire the work that goes into Baxters novels, For all their lack of fanciful poetics and the sometimes stilted dialogue, they are abundant in rich detail and wild imagination, Baxters research is astounding and there are innumerable great details that resemble their true historic origins, yet are utterly altered by the,years of different history.
The Christian religion, the advent of the steam engine and interactions with the Americas are all wickedly coloured by the influence of fictional Northland.


Thankfully the brutality that marked the previous novel, Bronze Summer, is less vivid and awful in the third book though, of course, its life, so its still brutal.
A reminder for anyone trying to read this or a great deal of Baxters other work: dont get too attached to characters Baxter is as random and cruel as life itself with the way he deals with his people.


Im really hoping that the series gets a fourth instalment, because Im fascinated by this world and really looking forward to seeing how the present might be shaped by such a vastly different past.


first posted here: sitelink comiron .