Tom Harper, Zodiac Station (2014)

What we have here is a very competently handled Arctic thriller. US Coast Guard ice-breaking cutter Terra Nova is working the frozen Nansen Basin when a desperate man comes looming out of the mist, skiing across the ice, and is shot by a startled security detail. The man lives, and in the vessel's sickbay tells his story: he is called Thomas Anderson, and has come from the research base Zodiac Station hundreds of kilometres away, a place full of (as Anderson tells it) high-strung scientists and administrators, a crucible of murder of conspiracy and violence. The base has now been exploded, as if by a bomb. As it happens, I have likewise planted a major spoiler in this review too, in the second paragraph, and it may well explode your enjoyment of reading the novel (if you haven't already read it). You have been warned. Otherwise, the authorities fly to Zodiac, and recover other survivors, who tell a rather different tale to Anderson. There are schemes and counter-schemes by climate scientists and climate change deniers in the pay of big industry, CIA involvement, freaky science, many polar bears; there's loads of zipping across the ice, exploring abandoned mines, falling down crevasses. As is the way with 'classic' thrillers a good deal of Quite Interesting Facticity is kneaded into the running-around, exploring, shooting, threatening-and-being-threatened plotline. The reader learns a good deal about the far north, about methane and arctic fauna and how you have to lift a snowmobile's back-end off the ice before you fire it up, since if its treads have got frozen to the ice you'll burn out the engine. Which is all fine. I thought the book starts very well, and then dissipates itself in a too-many-plotlines, too-many-red-herrings middle section. It might be that the red herrings looked redder and more obvious than they would otherwise have done, set against the bright white background of the ice-pack. Then there's the ending.

So, yes: spoiler. The brighter-hued herrings swim away to their red sea, and we're left with the normal-coloured herring -- Zodiac Station is a reworking of Frankenstein, taking its cue from the powerful initial and final scenes of Shelley's novel, also set, of course, on the polar ice. The Terra Nova is Harper's version of Walton's ship; the creature is genetically engineered instead of being stitched together from corpseparts but is still called The Creature, still stronger and cleverer than us, still a full grown adult of only a few years mental maturity and so on. Now all this is fine by me, and a fairly clever reveal; and looking back over the narrative lots of things (names, clues, quotations from Milton) drop into place. But it's tricky too. It's the two stools problem. For a SF geek like me, there's something anticlimactic about bringing in the Novum only at the very end; it ought to have been the starting point. Whereas a fan of straight thrillers (and Harper has written several of those, with considerable commercial and fannish success) is liable to agree with this Goodreads reviewer, who says: 'Good page turning thriller. A good few twists to keep you guessing. Fairly believable plot right up to the end where it does get a bit silly.' Hmm.