Book details of 'Ice Station'

Title	Ice Station
Author(s)	Matthew J. Reilly, Matt Reilly
ISBN	0312971230
Language	English
Published	September 2000
Publisher	St. Martin's Press

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
This is a thriller. An action thriller. A military action thriller. Lots of action: the type of plot that the phrase "one darned thing after another" was invented to describe. Lots of fancy new martial gadgets. Military technology is not my field, so I have to trust the author about all these wonderful weapons. But I don't have to trust him too far, especially when so much else is flatly wrong. There is an attack by a local pod of killer whales. Of course, there is the problem that resident killer whales eat fish, and it is only transient populations that go after large marine mammals. (Then again, Reilly talks about orcas fifteen feet long weighing five tons, so the characters in the story probably aren't in any great danger from such rolly porkers. Or the thirty foot, seven tonner that must be emaciated to the point of terminal illness.) The assaults seem to be copied from other (fictional) accounts of shark attacks and bear almost no resemblance to how orcas actually hunt or feed. (Orcas do chase prey into shallow waters and even onto beaches, but I doubt it would work that well on catwalks.) Then again, if you were to try and distract a pod of transient killer whales, a seal; even the sea-lion-like antarctic fur seal; would be a poor choice. For orcas that do feed on marine mammals the seal might almost be considered a favourite food. A small advantage in agility is no match for an animal that can lift a seal, and an extra few hundred pounds of water, several feet into the air with one flip of the flukes. The real howler, though, was when one character, as the monster was about to chow down on him, felt a "rush of warm air" from its gaping mouth. Whales, of course, breathe through their blowholes. If you have sufficient flammable gas in an area to ignite, there is an explosion, not nicely defined gouts of flame. But that probably wouldn't be a problem with "highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons," mainly because chlorofluorocarbons aren't highly flammable. In fact they were, and sometimes still are, used in fire extinguishers. Did I say that I had to trust Reilly for the military technology? I was wrong. A "nitrogen charge" about the size of a hand grenade might hold a cup of liquid nitrogen, if you were lucky. Poured directly onto some particularly fragile small item you might do some damage, but splashed around a room (particularly by an explosive, and therefore exothermic, charge) it wouldn't do much. A litre or two of liquid nitrogen dumped out on the floor will merely do a very good job of cleaning up gum wads and certain types of grease stains. Liquid nitrogen wouldn't be a very good weapon in any case: it's very cold, but it has a low specific heat. (An amount you can carry in your hand would hardly be able to freeze several thousand tons of sea water.) Splash it on exposed skin, and nothing much happens except that the nitrogen evaporates. (I've put my hands in liquid nitrogen, deliberately, and while I wouldn't want to leave them there indefinitely, I'm still typing with all ten fingers.) Oh, and liquid nitrogen is not "gooey." (And, Matt, I think the word you were looking for is "epoxy.") Neither is it blue. (Although liquid oxygen is a rather nice sapphire colour.) Should I talk about hovercrafts with brake and accelerator pedals, that suck air (and objects) *in* from underneath the skirt, and then cartwheel like Indy cars with a blown tire when a fan goes bad? No, if I do I'll get depressed. Same goes for aircraft that still have fuel in the tanks after decades, and, without any indication that construction was even finished in the first place, manage to work right the first time they are fired up. And I have a considerable problem with a fighter aircraft capable of carrying a nuclear power plant having the range to make it from Antarctica to pretty much anywhere. Then there is a diving bell that seems to be permanently open on one side while it goes up and down from the surface to 3,000 feet like a yo-yo. Having an opening on the bottom isn't necessarily a problem, but the changing pressure would mean that the airspace would shrink to almost nothing (one percent of the original volume) on the way down. If you pumped in more air (or gas mixture) to keep it clear at depth, then it would be venting bubbles all the way up. However, there is one great advantage to a diving bell that is open at the bottom: there is no pressure differential, so it can't explode. The abundance of solar flares does seem to correlate with increased sunspot activity, but a flare is not a sunspot; quite the reverse. The problematic "radiation" in solar flare activity is not ultraviolet: if it were, it would take eight minutes to reach the earth and then be gone. The major difficulty comes from heavily ionized gas plasma. And that cannot be aimed with relative pinpoint accuracy from 93 million miles away. I was glad to see some recognition that email has to travel over the same transmission paths as any other means of communication. It's too bad that nobody ever thought of the fact that email can be queued up and sent whenever an opportunity presents itself. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2000
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Book description:

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE GLOBE, Anarctica is the last unconquered continent, a murderous expanse of howling winds, blinding whiteouts and deadly crevasses. On one edge of Antarctica is Wilkes Station. Beneath Wilkes Station is the gate to hell itself... IN THE COLDEST PLACE ON EARTH, A team of U.S. divers, exploring three thousand feet beneath the ice shelf has vanished. Sending out an SOS, Wilkes draws a rapid deployment team of Marines-and someone else... THE HEAT IS ON... First comes a horrific firefight. Then comes a plunge into a drowning pool filled with killer whales. Next comes the hard part, as a handful of survivors begin an electrifying, red-hot, non-stop battle of survival across the continent and against wave after wave of elite military assassins-who've all come for one thing: a secret buried deep beneath the ice...