Search Results for: all-clear

Science fiction writer Sanford Kvass has a problem. Three problems, actually. He suffering from terrible writer’s block and owes his agent a large sum of money. The last thing he needs is the approaching distraction of the World Science Fiction Convention, with it’s obsessive fans, sex-mad SF groupies and professional writers and editors getting drunk and behaving badly.

But we said ‘three problems’, didn’t we? The best that can be said about Sanford Kvass’ third problem is that it renders his first two irrelevant. Kvass is approached by an alien ( a genuine alien, not a cosplay one) who informs him that the human race is to be tested: an alien will appear at the World Science Fiction Convention, disguised as a human being, and unless Kvass can unmask it, the Earth will be destroyed.

Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t present much of a challenge. All he’s have to do, is to observe as many people as he could and identify the one who clearly had no experience of normal social interaction. Voila! One unmasked alien.

There’s just one problem: this is Worldcon . . .

The death-stars had come, and they had kept on coming for hundreds of thousands of years, falling upon the Earth, swept upon it by a vagrant star that had passed through the outer reaches of the solar system. They brought with them a time of unending darkness and cold. It was an event that occured every twenty-six million years, and there was no turning it aside.

But all that was done with now. At last the death-stars had ceased to fall, the sky had cleared of dust and cinders, the sun’s warmth again was able to break through the clouds. The glaciers relinquished their hold on the land; the Long Winter ended; the New Springtime began. The world was born anew.

Now each year was warmer than the last. The fair seasons of spring and summer, long lost from the world, came again with increasing power. And the People, having survived the dark time in their sealed cocoons, were spreading rapidly across the fertile land. But others were already there. The hjjks, the somber cold-eyed insect-folk, had never retreated, even at the time of greatest chill. The world had fallen to them by default, and they had been its sole masters for seven hundred thousand years. They were not likely to share it gladly now . . .

‘The wolf Meshiska gave birth to five cubs on the night before full moon. Outside the den a storm was lashing the spruce trees. The sky and the land had become part of each other: a scatterwind night swirling with fragments of black and white. Snow became darkness and darkness snow, and any creature lost between the two found a rock or a tree and lay down beside it, to wait until the world had formed again.’

Into this bleak landscape, Athaba is born, a young wolf destined for great adventure. Exiled from his pack for breaking its rigid codes of behaviour and showing too much imagination, Athaba becomes a ‘raven wolf’, a lonely scavenger living on scraps and his wits.

Survival in the icy wastes is hard and dangerous without the comfort and protection of the pack. Injured, and stranded far from home, Athaba is forced to strike up an uneasy alliance with his natural enemy: a man. Together, but ever wary of each other, the wolf and the solitary hunter start their long walk home across the wilderness.

It soon becomes clear that the man must learn to be a wolf if he is to survive in the wolf’s world. And Athaba has to use all his imagination to learn new skills and strategies to fend for himself and his new pack member: for he discovers that men are frail, and often very ignorant!