WARNING: This review gives away a small amount of the plotline in this book.

Book details

Ice Station by Matt Reilly
First released in 1999
Published by St. Martin’s Paperbacks
534 pages

Overview

I have a confession to make… I love ridiculously improbable action paperbacks. I also like a quality read such as Cussler, Clancy, or Crichton but sometimes I want some junk food for my brain. Nothing substantial, just a quick sit down and read then forget it. With this genre of paperback, you must expect some suspension of disbelief and lots of crazy action sequences. I have a problem with people nit-picking details that are overboard. If you decide to pick up this book or any other by Reilly, enjoy the ride but don’t expect realism to get in the way of the action. Imagine any movie with Steven Seagal and you get the picture.

I first came across Matt Reilly when I picked up his more recent book Temple. It was a good action paperback, with the usual cliff-hanging and waterfall jumping stunts associated with books like this. The storyline was as believable as you can expect from a fiction novel about ancient temples and energy based superweapons. I picked up Ice Station some time after reading Temple and was immediately drawn into the story.

Plot and Character details

We begin on the edge of Antarctica at the U.S. controlled Wilkes Ice Station. The residents of the station are a mixture of geologists, biologists, paleontologists and other specialists in various fields. They have recently discovered a large vertical shaft in the ice shelf beneath them. Divers were sent down under the ice shelf to explore the newly found shaft. They are in radio contact the whole way up the shaft until they surface into a large cavern. As the divers break the surface of the water, radio contact is lost. A rescue party of six more divers is dispatched four hours after contact was lost with the Team 1. They submerge and make the required trip under the ice shelf and up the shaft. As they break the surface, no sign of the original team is found. Team 2 treads water and looks around the enormous cave they are now in. As they make a report back to Wilkes they see a large black object partially embedded in the ice wall. Team leader Ben Austin reports; “Ah, there is something else down here… I think I’m looking at a spaceship.” As the team stares in awe at the large black object, a splash is heard behind them. One of their members is jerked under the water viciously as more splashes are heard. Austin shouts over the radio that Team 2 is under attack. Within seconds, he is the only one left alive. He desperately shouts over the radio; ”They are coming out of the walls, I can’t see anyone left… call for help, call anyone you can!” Transmission is then lost with Team 2. The radio operator immediately starts calling for assistance stating that Wilkes Ice Station has sustained heavy losses, and is under attack. She also makes a big mistake in mentioning the discovery of what seems to be a spacecraft.

A raging storm outside takes down the radio tower, and a large solar flare is jamming all other means of long range communication. A nearby U.S. warship hears the distress cry however, and lands a strike force of Force Recon units led by Lieutenant Shane Schofield at McMurdo Ice Station. It is yet another U.S. held research and monitoring station 900 miles from Wilkes. In between the two is D’Urville Station which is owned and manned by the French government.

That’s all the story details I’ll give you as the rest should be read not described. There are enough tense moments to keep you reading, and enough of a plausible story to keep you interested. There are quite a few events that really require you to toss rationality out the proverbial window however, mostly involving the feats of derring-do by Lt. Schofield. Whether it’s defeating various elite military units that outnumber his team, driving a hovercraft backwards across an iceberg at 80 MPH with shot out windows in extreme sub-zero temps while shooting accurately at enemy hovercrafts and disabling them, swinging like Tarzan one-handed from his MagHook with another person hanging from his other hand, or many other Jerry Bruckheimer-esque stunts that will leave you chuckling. I don’t know if that was reaction Reilly was looking for, but I couldn’t help myself sometimes.

The weapons and devices portrayed in this book are believable, but I’m not sure if they are fictional or if Reilly actually researched them before inclusion. For instance, the U.S. Force Recon has a special weapon called the MagHook. It is a grappling hook that is both a claw and a magnet. Once engaged, it can pull up several hundred pounds via a winch-like device built into it. You can disengage both the claw and magnet from the handle of the unit allowing you to retrieve the cable and reuse the weapon.

The French special forces carry a high powered crossbow the size of a handgun.

British SAS commandos employ Nitrogen grenades as their signature weapon. When detonated, the Supercooled Nitrogen splashes everywhere and freezes whatever it touches upon contact, causing any human with exposed skin to die very quickly. Nitrogen doesn’t have to penetrate the skin, just come in contact with it. You are essentially frozen to death by the liquid blue goo.

The fact that each “team” has a “special weapon” makes it seem as though you are reading a video game. That is a good analogy actually, as the book is rather like a game. As you near the end, the pieces of the puzzle all come together, with answers given to most of the questions the reader will have.

Final comments

I enjoyed this book, but it’s not really something you can re-read again as the hook in the story is wanting to find out what happens next. If you know already, there isn’t much reason to read further. If you don’t like paperbacks in this genre or find Independence Day annoying as a movie because of how “unrealistic” it is, do yourself a favor and skip this book. You’ll only get annoyed and find fault with many things in the book. On a side note there is a enthusiastic blurb on the cover of Ice Station by Fox News Channel's resident Navy Seal expert Richard Marchenko. What that says about the realism portrayed in this book is scary...

If you can set your common sense aside for a few hours and just get swept away in an adventure on the Antarctic ice, then pick up a copy and start reading. You’ll have a hard time putting it down once you start, and that’s the only problem I had.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment on my review.
Openroad

Recommended: Yes