Book Review: Welcome to the 'Interloper' Trilogy - All Aboard the Icebreaker!

 

The strongest point in favor of reading Icebreaker, the first novel in the Interloper trilogy by Steven William Hannah, is also a warning. I started reading, and ten pages became 50. Within 60 pages, I knew I had to purchase the other two books in the trilogy. The book is wonderfully written. Hannah’s prose is rich and evocative, and his writing paints a wildly well-imagined universe full of complex characters. Icebreaker is a ceaselessly compelling journey, one which encompasses both simple survival and a deeper comprehension of Hannah’s larger world.

 Icebreaker is a Crawler--a huge, highly-armored transport vehicle suitable for travel between settlements in the post-Cataclysm world, where almost every human lives in perpetual fear of the Phenomenon. Some call it Gaia, or The Hell That Walks, and it has plunged our world into a fearsomely strange hellscape. The Phenomenon is a walking, moving storm of terraforming and terrifying power. Simply to see, hear, or perceive the Phenomenon risks Exposure, a fate much worse than death and far darker than insanity alone. 

 Our protagonist, Bear--a rationalist and a committed scientist and researcher--finds himself joining the crew of Icebreaker to bring crucial information that could help this ragtag society understand and fight the Phenomenon to the capital settlement of Union City, all while his home settlement of Forgehead is under siege. The Phenomenon is coming, foreshadowed only by the strange and darkly vivid dreams shared by the settlement's inhabitants. Not only that, there’s a cult of religious fanatics loose in Forgehead: the self-described "Dreamers," whose goal is to see every human being put through the "test" of locking eyes with Gaia and trying to endure the nightmare experience. Only one in a thousand survive Exposure, and one of them--a fanatic who calls himself only "Messenger"--is hunting Icebreaker's crew. He considers them the most worthy and likely to survive Exposure and build a new world for the Dreamers, side-by-side with Gaia herself. 

 Bear is joined aboard the Crawler by Dusty, the warm, fierce and storied Captain of Icebreaker; Bee, a tough-as-nails, Valkyrian warrior who is also a committed Christian; Glass, an enormous, mysterious, and mostly-silent Gaian who has seen and survived much in his time as a member of the Icebreaker crew (and before that); and May, the adorable pre-Cataclysm artificial intelligence who steers the Icebreaker safely through the perilous landscape, but who cannot disclose her leagues of knowledge regarding the Phenomenon itself. Bear finds himself questioning his rationalist principles as well as the very laws that govern the living world.

Along for the ride, readers learn firsthand just how dark and damned the human experience can be.