translated by Ursula Phillips
published by Head of Zeus: Ad Astra in November 2025.
Review by Duncan Lunan
Told in first person, Ice is the story of Benedykt Gieroslawski, a 24-year-old philosophy student in Warsaw, whose father has disappeared in Siberia. In his world, rather than exploding in the air, the 1908 Tunguska meteorite hit earth and released a form of alive and sentient ice called ‘gleiss’. People who approach are compelled to touch it and are then absorbed (rather than changed as in The Quatermass Experiment or consumed as in The Blob) and pulled apart as the Ice expands. Some, including Benedykt’s father, survive and communicate with the Ice telepathically. By 1924, gleiss has taken over much of Siberia and Russia and is spreading into Poland. While World War 1 and the October Revolution never happened, Russia is losing the ongoing war with Japan, and the Tsar is trying anything to stop the loss of his territory, while a disciple of Rasputin’s has founded a new religion preaching acceptance of the Ice as God’s will.
Together with Nikola Tesla, Benedykt is sent to Irkutsk, near where his father was last seen, with orders by the Tsar to find a way to destroy the Ice and reclaim the lost Russian territory. Their train carries representatives of various political and religious factions. Having amused himself by posing as a Russian aristocrat, Benedykt is soon denounced as a fraud by a genuine Russian prince. Nobody trusts him except Jelena, a mysterious young woman whom he tries to put off with a chapter-long lecture on his philosophical belief in three different orders of reality, which only fascinates her more. I wondered if she was a reporter sent to follow him, like the ones in James Blish’s Mission to the Heart Stars, but her original purpose remains obscure. Being committed to a long expedition in search of his father, Benedykt fends her off, but he tells himself that it doesn’t matter because they’ll be together in one of the other realities, whereas he is convinced that he doesn’t exist in the one they currently occupy. He keeps this up when they reach Irkutsk, breaking Jelena’s heart and earning well-deserved rebukes from her friends.
It’s only as the train gets nearer to the Ice with its extraordinary daylight aurora and those alternative realities start to affect it that the reader begins to think Benedykt is on to something. Impossible things start happening, recalling Brian Aldiss’s drug-fuelled Barefoot in the Head, though that is a model of clarity by comparison. In Aldiss’s novel, there’s been a war in Europe fought with psychedelic drugs as weapons, and how the characters perceive reality gets weirder and weirder as they travel towards the epicentre. Here, reality itself is being altered, and yes, the Ice is clearly responsible.
A saboteur pitches Benedykt off the train. Badly injured, he’s saved from exposure by a native shaman who drugs him, and the next thing he knows, he’s back on the train. It seems that Jelena missed him, organised a search, then persuaded the Russian prince to order the train stopped at a siding. If all that took three hours, say, and the express averaged 60 miles per hour, or worse still 90, rescue on foot would be impossible, but nobody finds it odd. We’re told later that shamans can travel at great speed along underground veins of Ice called the Ways of the Mammoths, but there’s no suggestion that Benedykt was brought to within reach of the train.
Benedykt spends the rest of the journey winding up other passengers, especially with his repeated insistence that he doesn’t exist in the reality he occupies. Expecting everything to be prepared for him at Irkutsk, instead he’s abducted and almost buried alive by one of the religious factions. Dumped on the street, he faces death by exposure again but is rescued by one of the local industrial barons. Despite still more injuries, sustained in trying to escape from the coffin, he makes another lightning recovery, putting me in mind of all the adventure novels I’d read by age 12 in which heroes’ injuries routinely vanished. Shifting realities clearly has its advantages.
In Irkutsk, Benedykt is opposed by local politicians and industrialists who are profiting hugely from new industries exploiting the characteristics of the Ice. The Ice changes the laws of physics as well as linking alternative realities, and, reminiscent of 1930s ‘superscience’ novels, Dukaj explains the ‘science new and invented’ of the book with no attempt to ‘show, not tell’. Many of the nouveaux-riches are trying to sell the new technologies to the Americans (Edison, for example) in hopes to bring the U.S. in before the impending Japanese invasion.
Eventually, Benedykt is allowed to mount his expedition, but it’s attacked by a hostile faction during assembly. The ensuing firefight through streets filled with near-solid, translucent fog through which moving people leave tunnels, is one of the most vivid sections of the book. Hounded into the wilderness with a last few followers, Benedykt is pursued by werewolves that regenerate like Doctor Who when killed. With his friends dead and ammunition running out, he takes shelter in one of the mysterious and dangerous structures that erupt from the Ice. Newly injured and badly frostbitten, he escapes to find a giant ice sculpture of his father, who’s reached him through the Ways of the Mammoth, but the father’s thought processes are too slow for them to communicate. Without food or shelter, Benedykt faces death by exposure once more.
He wakes in a spring landscape. The Ice has disappeared – all of it, not just the gleiss, but also the natural permafrost. Benedykt recovers at a trading post before wandering the new wilderness, roamed by nomads deprived of the jobs and homes for which they came, in search of Jelena.
Ice ends with a 13-page article by translator Ursula Phillips, which would have worked better as a preface, as it is essential to understanding the novel. It makes us appreciate the difficulty of the translator’s task: for one, Polish has no articles such as ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’, which she must supply without changing the sense or pacing, and in English ‘icy’ has many different meanings, but Polish has separate words for many of them, for which the translator has to supply context. The novel is written in a stream of consciousness, for which Ms Phillips has used second person present tense imperative (‘Go to the table’, rather than ‘I went to the table’ or ‘You go to the table’.) Everything is described in meticulous detail, reminiscent of Brian Aldiss’s Report on Probability A.
What makes the text even more difficult is that the narrative is saturated with invented ‘Russian’ words, made up by Dukaj to illustrate the Russian domination of Poland in his imagined 1924. Polish readers were to recognise them by the general similarities between the two languages, and Phillips has left many of them for English-speaking readers to work out from the context or the four-page glossary at the back, which is physically hard to reach due to the sheer size of the book.
The novel is a big achievement, but very hard to read. It needs the same kind of concentration as Iain M. Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, which I enjoyed, but in both, I could read only a few pages at a time. The author’s supposed not to make reading into a task – but not everyone thinks that way: to complaints about the difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce replied, ‘It has taken my whole life to write it, the least you can do is to take all of yours to read it.’ Jacek Dukaj and Ursula Phillips may reasonably say the same.
Born in 1945, Duncan Lunan has been a full time author, researcher, lecturer, broadcaster, editor, critic and tutor since 1970, specialising in astronomy, spaceflight and science fiction. He has published 10 books to date and contributed to 43 more, altogether publishing 43 stories and over 2080 articles, as of June 2025. He was science fiction critic of the Glasgow Herald from 1971 to 1985, and ran the paper’s SF and fantasy short story competition from 1986 to 1992. As Manager of the Glasgow Parks Department’s Astronomy Project in 1978-79, he built the first astronomically aligned stone circle in Britain for over 3000 years (recreated at a new site in 2019); he was on the management committee of Airdrie Public Observatory from 1977 to 2008, serving as a curator for 18½ years, and ran the North Lanarkshire Astronomy Project 2006-2009. He is a former Chair of the Astronomers of the Future Club in his home town of Troon, to which he returned with his wife Linda in 2012, moving to Lamlash, Isle of Arran, in 2024. His monthly astronomy column ‘The Sky Above You’ appears in various newspapers and magazines, he writes weekly and monthly columns in Orkney News, and he reviews SF for Parsec and Shoreline of Infinity, as well as non-fiction for Concatenation and both for Orkney News.