A very long book by Jacek Dukaj
May. 9th, 2026 07:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petrea_mitchellI've had books that I mean to blog about piling up for a while. I'll start with the most recent one.
Ice was originally published in Polish in 2007, and just made it into English last year. It's set in an alternate history where the Tunguska impact created a spreading zone of altered physics in Siberia. The protagonist is charged to travel into Siberia to find his missing father, who may have developed some influence on the possibly sentient phenomena that accompany it.
This is a very long book. An extremely long book. A book of such size that the sheer volume of it crushes any attempt to think about any of its other aspects. A lot of that space is taken up by political and philosophical speeches, which are interesting at first as the reader is introduced to the factions of a world in which Tsarist Russia still exists and Irkutsk is a boomtown for miners exploiting the alien ores brought in by the impact, but eventually left me sighing and wondering when another tidbit about the main plot would drop.
Politics and philosophy are relevant because it isn't just that different events have led to a different history, but that the Ice, as the altered zone is called, appears to directly retard inspiration and progress. The central question ultimately becomes whether to harness that effect, and if so, how.
But man. People go on and on. This book could have used some editing. By the time the main character made up his mind, I didn't care anymore, I was just checking to see how much more book there was to get through.
Two other long books came to mind as I was reading Ice. One was Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle, which also played with weird physics, and also contained the idea that (another effect of the weird physics in both books) history is malleable even well after the fact. The spaces between the big plot revelations in Ash, though, have a lot more action and drama.
The other one I wound up thinking of was The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This takes place in an alternate timeline where the Black Death killed nearly everyone in Europe, but scientific and political advances happen more or less on the same schedule, just in different places. It has a deliberate focus on some of the slower and less exciting stretches of that history. It is practically a novella compared to Ice, but it felt like a very long book at the time. And it's a good parallel otherwise because it's another case where I feel like the author achieved what he set out to do, only that thing was not sufficiently interesting to me to like it at that length.
I'm not sorry to have tried reading Ice; I believe in having a varied literary diet and it did have ideas that were entirely new to me. But one of it is enough to last me some time. I'm not going to be seeking out any of Dukaj's other work.
Ice was originally published in Polish in 2007, and just made it into English last year. It's set in an alternate history where the Tunguska impact created a spreading zone of altered physics in Siberia. The protagonist is charged to travel into Siberia to find his missing father, who may have developed some influence on the possibly sentient phenomena that accompany it.
This is a very long book. An extremely long book. A book of such size that the sheer volume of it crushes any attempt to think about any of its other aspects. A lot of that space is taken up by political and philosophical speeches, which are interesting at first as the reader is introduced to the factions of a world in which Tsarist Russia still exists and Irkutsk is a boomtown for miners exploiting the alien ores brought in by the impact, but eventually left me sighing and wondering when another tidbit about the main plot would drop.
Politics and philosophy are relevant because it isn't just that different events have led to a different history, but that the Ice, as the altered zone is called, appears to directly retard inspiration and progress. The central question ultimately becomes whether to harness that effect, and if so, how.
But man. People go on and on. This book could have used some editing. By the time the main character made up his mind, I didn't care anymore, I was just checking to see how much more book there was to get through.
Two other long books came to mind as I was reading Ice. One was Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle, which also played with weird physics, and also contained the idea that (another effect of the weird physics in both books) history is malleable even well after the fact. The spaces between the big plot revelations in Ash, though, have a lot more action and drama.
The other one I wound up thinking of was The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. This takes place in an alternate timeline where the Black Death killed nearly everyone in Europe, but scientific and political advances happen more or less on the same schedule, just in different places. It has a deliberate focus on some of the slower and less exciting stretches of that history. It is practically a novella compared to Ice, but it felt like a very long book at the time. And it's a good parallel otherwise because it's another case where I feel like the author achieved what he set out to do, only that thing was not sufficiently interesting to me to like it at that length.
I'm not sorry to have tried reading Ice; I believe in having a varied literary diet and it did have ideas that were entirely new to me. But one of it is enough to last me some time. I'm not going to be seeking out any of Dukaj's other work.
