A review by roach
Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

 

He sailed past an alien gray landscape, a vast confusion of ice and cold sky. Night came hard.

This winter, I was in the mood to give some arctic scifi a shot and Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger sounded perfect for that. A small group of people in a more or less distant future crash-land on a completely frozen, desolate planet with few signs of life strewn about. Even more interesting, the native inhabitants of this planet seem to live medieval lives, which makes for some interesting genre-clashing of scifi and fantasy at points.

I really adore the setting and setup. There are lots of cool idea here with great potential and Foster definitely manages to string together a rather lighthearted, easy-to-read romp. The characters aren't are rather flat and the stakes never bear that much weight, but it got drama, action, and comedy. It made for a decent read with a couple highlights here and there.
It just never became great and it left some things to be desired for me. I wish the book would have spent more time exploring the ice cold wilderness with its limited flora and fauna more than it did. The bits there are are fun, but the book focuses much more on the medieval culture of the indigenous hosts. That is interesting too, but there could have been more.
The final act also delivers some oddly sudden and abrupt action pieces that felt very disconnected. A couple of ideas that could have been fleshed out to make for their own adventure all sort-of discarded to the final pages of the book. One of them including an encounter with another group of brand-new characters that could have made for their own adventure, which makes me wonder if they show up in one of the sequel books again.

Either way, this was a decent read at least and I enjoyed my time with it fairly well. But it didn't leave me very satisfied and I hope the sequels will give me more of what I want from this setting.