The Frozen Sky: A Novel

Strange novel. Great premise, decent characters, tons of science, great imagination, but ultimately it didn't really add up, and the ending was an unexpected fizzle. To make a long story short: Life on earth has advanced significantly. We're now profitably mining Jupiter's moon Europa. We have space suits that are out-of-this-world (!) advanced. They walk for you, run for you, feed you and carry out extensive medical repairs on you when you're injured. They fight for you while they repair you. They continue to work, walk, run, repair even when you're exhausted/half-dead. They're highly intelligent. They analyse, they compute, they code, hack, learn, advise. They interface with personal mem files, with AI, with anything.Which is to say, we've come a long way, baby. And so what happens when life is discovered on Europa? Well, it appears we ain't so advanced after all. We send in an advanced team of three highly intelligent scientists, picked from millions of candidates, who land, immediately circumvent orders, get into trouble and then the whole first contact thing kind of goes kablooey.It was a bit hard to swallow, frankly. The advanced team is followed by a few other teams with more administrators, techies, etc., from several space agencies, most notably from Europe and Brazil, and they spend time spying on each other, hacking each other's systems, creating and breaking alliances, disobeying orders, goofing with the suits back on earth, profiting from the nine-minute communications delay with home, etc. It's actually good reading, but it just isn't very believable. The greatest event in history - the finding of life on another planet/moon - and all we do is screw up in a very amateurish way. I can understand we have to screw up some - it's a novel, after all, and it needs drama - but the screwing up is so ridiculously goofy. Management and administration of this first contact is beyond abysmal, and I can't believe it's carried out by the same wizards who created those unbelievable space suits. To create a space suit of that nature would not require just good tech, but also amazing process, development, management and QA skills. Those skills are utterly missing in the actions of the groups on Europa, and in the actions of their bosses on earth. Amateurs like this could never have mounted mining operations to Europa, or invented a space suit that would repair your ruined eyeball while it fed you, fought off an attack and began analysing and translating the attacker's sonic and physical language.Nonetheless, the great science and mecha and all the wizardry and the drama kept the thing going until *poof* -- it simply ended. I read it on Kindle, and at the 94% mark, the heroes scored a major victory and were celebrating. I figured a major twist was coming, something that would cut their celebration short. I went to the next page and saw the words `The End'! My jaw dropped. It simply ended. The antagonists are not heard from again. I realize there's a sequel, and maybe it'll be a series, but this sort of thing is just way below Carlson. He's a real author, not some indie, and he has to end his novel properly. The final six percent of the book is acknowledgements, thanks, and a short story.Weird. And I don't understand why someone like Carlson is charging a couple bucks for his work, as though it's an indie effort. Publishing is becoming weird.Anyway, three stars for the science and the premise and pretty good action, but I'm not going to read the sequel. And I'd recommend you read his Plague Year series instead. Far superior.

The Frozen Sky remains an excellent story. I first read it as a short story, and enjoyed it thoroughly, so I approached the full length story with a bit of trepidation. I was afraid that the process of lengthening the story would take away from its quality and pacing. I’m happy to say those fears were mostly misplaced.The first portion of the story, with Von’s initial journey under the ice and encounter with the aliens, is the same in substance in both versions of the story. I could spot a few new details that were added, including some more interaction with Von and Lam setting up later portions of the book. This early portion of The Frozen Sky does what’s become a hallmark of Carlson’s work – he takes someone and breaks them, both physically and emotionally. The journey he takes these flawed people on – and us with them – is what makes his stories so good.Von is an especially well filled out character, and she is as frustratingly imperfect as any real person would be. Her closest team mates are also pretty well completed people. Lam is an intriguing addition to the mix, since he is a synthetic personality based on one of Von’s dead teammates.The people that are not as well created are Von’s primary antagonists - Dawson the scientist/corporate sell out, Ribeiro, the Brazilian military leader, and her boss, Koebsch, who is always a step ahead but, in the end, turns out to be a good guy (but who could have been a bad guy if it had suited him). These characters seem to be more stock characters from central casting, with typical motivations and actions, and none of the complexity of the primary characters.The weakness of Carlson’s secondary characters would be a problem if it weren't for the tremendous strength of his technical details, and of the overall story. The mechanisms of extra planetary industry and travel, moon geology (both rock and ice) and how they interact with Jupiter’s tides, foreseeable advances in AI and nanotech – all of his work in these areas is really top notch.But the most outstanding technical writing involves the aliens themselves – their physiology and psychology. This grows entirely out of the environment in which they have evolved, and they work together perfectly. Late in the book there is a perspective revelation that is just a thunderbolt, and makes so many other things fall into place – sort of like finding out Bruce Willis is dead most of the way through The Sixth Sense.As with the Plague series, one of the things Carlson creates in Von is a person that has the moral authority to make a difference, put in a place where they can actually do so. I like the fact that his characters come to the places they do through trial and tribulation – it’s realistic, and it asks the reader to put themselves in the same situation and ask if they could measure up.If you haven’t read The Frozen Sky, do so. If you’ve read the short version, read the long one. And then cheer for Jeff Carlson to write more books.

This book started well with the main character,Vonny, under attack and desperately trying to escape the underground world of the Sunfish on the moon Europa. She has made first contact with an alien and seemingly hostile species. Through her we explore the nuances of what might be involved in such contact. But the book goes on...and on...and on ...about the politics, corporate interests and international rivalries that come about as a consequence. Yes, these are important issues but it feels like being stuck in the corner with the party bore while he goes on for hours about his interest in watching paint dry. There is some romance/sexual attraction portrayed which adds precisely nothing to the plot or characterisation. Overall, good plot idea but far too verbose. Yet another writer who needs a good editor. I'm beginning to wonder if 'Series' is coming to mean ' could have been done well in one book if properly edited' ? Better stop now or I'll feel compelled to demote this to 2 stars.

TFS is definitely inspired by Gregory Benford's hard sf like In The Ocean Of Night - it's much more ambitious than the average kindle original. Unfortunately, it suffers from zero characterization depth, poor world building, the lack of an overall interesting question driving the book, and plotting by poor quality deus ex machina. Eg near the start that heroine has her suit illegally absorb a dead colleagues memory files to give it an AI. But if the suit hardware can run AI, why doesn't it already have one? Especially as human based AI is said to be especially unreliable. Why, on an exploration mission, do three space walking astronauts carry each other's personality in executeable form? The book relies on unmotivated actions and suddenly produced technological crutches for every important event.

This book is set in the near-future; no technology used or described is implausible, and Europa is our last plausible place to find intelligent life within our solar system. The author avoids getting bogged-down in the technicalities of near-future technology, making it as normal as having a pocket-sized mobile phone is now.The story works well, as it's told in a series of bubbles; there are no characters on Earth, 15+ light-minutes away, but the human characters come from an Earth that is very similar to our own, albeit with slightly different balances between the geo-political powers in play.In one sense, it's refreshing to have a male author from the USA write from the viewpoint of a female ESA astronaut who has made first contact, but we have to accept that she would think and act as she does, in this near-future scenario. Why and in what ways is she European? Why is the potential villain of the piece on Europa a British-European male ESA astronaut who's a lot older than she is?This book works well; it has riffs on Quatermass, Star Trek, the Alien movies and even Dr Who. It nods to Brian Aldiss, Iain M. Banks and other "Sci-Fi" writers of the late-20th/early-21st centuries CE, and sets the stage for an interesting sequel.

There are probably two aspects to this novel, which concerns itself with the exploration of Jupiter’s moon, Europa: the first is how our near-future descendants undertake the adventure into the outer solar system; the second is the manner in which politics of future Earth play out. I could not buy into either of Jeff Carlson’s ideas, I’m afraid.On the plus side, the detail of the life form discovered on Europa is creative and the day-by-day struggles of the explorers to survive the alien world are likely realistic. However, I couldn’t warm to any of the characters whatsoever nor understand how various interested governments on Earth interact and respond to the commercial pressures that the adventure generates. Hence the difficulty I had reading and finishing the novel. There is a sequel, described as a novella, that I’ll read for completeness in the hope that it will grab my attention, as this first instalment seems to have done for others.

I can be a bit picky when it comes to awarding 5 stars but this one hit everything I could think of and more.From start to end it held me enthralled, loosing myself in the icy wastes of a frozen moon orbiting our solar system's largest planet. The turmoil of the moon itself is nothing compared to the turmoil happening beneath its surface, from the very beginning where the heroine Von is trapped beneath the ice being hunted by malevolent alien creatures to her escape and having to fit in with other humans who she doesn't know or trust , to fighting against simple human greed and stupidity. You really feel for this woman and urge her to succeed.My only criticism of this book is I want a follow up as I haven't enjoyed reading and loosing myself in a book this much in years.