Surprise find during yesterday's Great English Book Swap. Having never heard about this author before, I thought I'd give his science fiction novel a try. The book started its journey on the shelf of Bill and Pat in Salkum, WA that is 5,220 mi (8.401 km) from Bamberg as the crow flies. The title comes from a quote out of "The Weir of Hermiston" by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Ice and iron cannot be welded."

Blurb
The time might well be today in this intriguing science fiction tale in which the vagaries of weather open the door to an unknown civilization from the past - or is it the future?
     Across the globe a new ice age is encroaching. From Alberta to Ontario most of Canada is deserted, its people resettled in the southern United States and Mexico, while mile by mile, century by century, the glacier grinds down their former homes.
     Fisher Yann Highsmith is a scientist stationend, with a few colleagues, on the edge of the ice field, recording its relentless growth and the destruction of life in its path. In the midst of this barren landscape the team recovers a weird assortment of artifacts that seem to appear suddenly out of thin air, and Highsmith fits them together into a fantastic theory of another dimenstion. Then the search parties begin to find bodies out of time an place and Highsmith's history of parallel worlds becomes a chilling reality.

Ice and Iron is Wilson Tucker's twenty-first novel. A stage electrician at Illinois State University, Mr. Tucker lives with his wife and children in Heyworth, IL, and is currently at work on a new book about a world-wide manhunt for Gilgamesh.
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Wenn man ein amerikanisches Buch eines amerikanischen Autors über Amerika registriert und die BC-ID zweimal die Jahreszahl der Entdeckung Amerikas enthält, dann muß man deswegen vielleicht keinen Weinbrand trinken, aber einen Eintrag bei [OT] Unglaubliche Zufälle in/mit Büchern war's mir schon wert.

The book deals with a future threatened not by global warming but by a return of the glaciers to the south, i.e. another ice age. Somehow, the boundaries between two instances of the multiverse have become leaky and artifacts and (most often dead) bodies rain down in the novel's time, coming from an even more distant future. One living specimen is recovered by a search team in Lloydminster, SK. Outposts of civilization shelter small teams (pilot, physician, polylibrarian, reconstructionist as well as maintenance staff and troops for protection) that evaluate the evidence collected by the search teams and try to make sense of it.

Like our historians trying to shine a light on the events of the distant past by putting together a puzzle of artifacts and (for the more recent history) written sources, it is very difficult to come to the right conclusion. The books changes times with every chapter (ice standing for the book's now, iron for the distant future producing the abovementioned artifacts). The story ends rather abruptly with the abandonment of the station near Regina, SK, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions.

The book will continue its journey to a Canadian expat.