As usual, I get hung up on the “baddies” in a story. In Song of The Ice Lord, the Ice Lord is our baddie, most likely a spirit/god/demon of destruction and hunger. Not hunger for food, but hunger for everything. The Ice Lord seems to be driven by a desire or need to devour all it touches. Once a place has come into contact with the Ice Lord, it is completely destroyed by it/him/her and its armies. The Ice Lord’s method of gathering armies is through fear, the fear of being devoured. Thinking about the Ice Lord made me think about humanity’s hunger and destructiveness. We are good at that. Sadly, too good. Perhaps we will be lucky and find ourselves a Lodden and Maran to save us from ourselves.

War is one of the many mysteries I struggle to understand. I do realize that humans are incredibly territorial. As a breed, we seem to want to expand our own lands and ideas of right and wrong, even if that means killing other humans. The Skral, Sharan and Gai Ren are no exception to this. What started out as one people developed into competing tribes and nations. At regular intervals they would attack their neighboring countries, city-states or tribal competitors. When the Ice Lord arrives on the scene a few people from each nationality escapes and they are taken to the islands of the Skral. These, usually competing, people band together in an attempt to dethrone the Ice Lord without destroying every last remnant of themselves and their cultures. Changing alliances. What a bizarre phenomenon and terribly confusing to my asperger brain. One of my thoughts on reading this was the same as the thought whenever I hear of this happening in the real world: “How long will it take before they are killing each other again?” Historically speaking, not very long at all.

Song of the Ice Lord is in many ways a terrifying story. Horror it ain’t, not in any kind of manner. But its way of nailing the future of nations (historical and current) makes me want to shout: “can’t we just be friends, please, and stop all of this destruction”. A girl can dream.

The flow of words was very different to the other stories in this series. Most of that probably has to do with the insertion of the three short stories, all three important in the context of the over-all story.

Definitely recommended.

Reviews:

• CS Fantasy Reviews

Song of the Ice Lord available at Smashwords

I was given a copy by the author