Snowfall (The Snowfall Trilogy, Book 1)

By Mitchell Smith

Book Overview

Snowfall features another sharp-tongued, uncompromising heroine, Catania Olsen. She is the doctor for and spiritual guardian of a band of hunters who live at the edge of a great Wall of ice in what was once Colorado. In the country of the Trappers, books are hand-copied so that knowledge may be preserved, but the technology described in their precious pages is mostly lost to their fur-clad readers, despite Catania's attempts at scientific treatment and the Trappers' careful husbanding of ancient metal tools.As a resurgent population moves west and north from the more settled places that had once been the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast of the United States, they drive tribesmen-Cree, Arapaho, and more-before them. On the run and desperate to find new homes, the tribes slaughter entire populations to claim their lands. The Trappers are innocent of this until Jack Monroe, banished years before for murdering a fellow Trapper, arrives, urging them to flee their ancestral home, the Trappers do not listen until nearly too late, until the first enemy arrows have found their marks.The southern flight of the surviving Trappers is a journey through time as well as space. From a frozen northland where summer lasts two chilly weeks through a burgeoning forest where the Trappers taste their first beef to a gulf coast where warm breezes carry exotic scents and sounds; from a primitive life of hunting and trapping to the luxurious Gardens, where people can still weave and make paper, to a bustling trade mart where man-beasts created by unnatural science tread the dirt streets, Catania is shocked to recognize that the proud Trappers have spent generations clinging to civilization with their fingernails.The journey into the warm lands will change Doctor Catania Olsen, mind, heart, and soul. She will gain and lose a love, see great wisdom and greater folly, witness amazing miracles and terrifying science, and, most surprising to herself, become a mother. Finally, she will have to choose between her people and her freedom.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312878966
• ISBN13: 9780312878962
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Forge Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.2" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

Mankind in the next iceage

Set in the future after the next ice age has destroyed most of civilization, this is a story about Dr. Catania Olsen a member of the Trappers tribe, a group by people living in the North at the edge of the glacial wall. Enough time has passed so that most knowledge has been lost. Civilization is still on the fall. It is a brutal time and life is very hard. Catania's tribe is attacked and forced to move. The tribe meets the Garden people, which live in the forest. There Catania meets the rather extreme one-eyed doctor. Catania must tread carefully with the half-mad woman. I enjoyed this story. It is creative and well thought out. We are not presented a world where humanity bravely steps up to and overcomes a challenge, but where it descends back into darkness and merely strives for survival. An interesting story.

a gripping tale of future survival!

The next Ice Age is upon us: imagine the mile-high cliff of ice at your back, with the Rocky Mountains another impenetrable wall of ice to the west, & people from the east, who once occasionally hunted peaceably on the periphery of your territory, are now intent on taking over your traplines & your caves. Where do you go? Into the great, green forest to the South where the snow ends & monsters dwell?Mitchell Smith has created a whole new future, with particular attention to the anthropological aspects of how we might have made it, what things & thoughts might have survived from the Warm Time.I particularly enjoyed the fully realized heroines & heroes, those who die & those who survive. They have keen insights & eyesights that we, today in our citified lethargy, have long since discarded. Each person could have walked in today's world & felt a glimmer of recognition for us modern folks & our modern nation, except...SNOWFALL is a marvelous, richly-textured adventure that allows us a glimpse of what really might happen when our descendants have to grapple with the inevitable change in the Earth's climate. What will happen to Chicago, for instance, when thousands of feet of snow bury the city? What will happen to our store of knowledge, once electricity is no more? What will happen to our society? Who then will be the readers of what books? What will the doctors know? Who will be our leaders? What kinds of relationships will we have?If you read only one science-fiction/anthropology book this year, read SNOWFALL! Mitchell Smith has written a superb survivalist saga, that lingers in your mind everafter, wondering. It certainly deserves a sequel, for I would dearly love to know how Catania makes it to the Sierras & the snow-bound warrior/hunters who live there.

Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi (without the SCI)

I have mixed feelings about this novel. On one hand, it has a pretty neat premise: The impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter in 1994 perturbed that planet's orbit imperceptibly, yet just enough to cause gradual climatic change on Earth, and hundreds of years later we are in the grip of a new Ice Age. Cool idea! Yet I'm troubled by the fact that such climate change would necessarily result in the catastrophic setback of science and culture depicted in this book. If the climate change had been accompanied by, for instance, a few good meteor impacts, the tribal existence of the book's protagonists would have been far more plausible. Too many questions are left unanswered here, and "Snowfall" is left begging for a sequel.That having been said, I still found this novel quite entertaining. I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic sci-fi, although there is precious little sci-fi here. Instead Mitchell Smith has painted a rich picture of a tribal community that calls itself the Trappers, living a tooth-and-nail existence just below the Wall Of Ice that engulfed Canada and the northern half of the United States. Having been forced off their land by tribes that have in turn been forced off THEIR land, the remnants of the Trappers must move south to warmer climes and strange human cultures. There are some memorable, well-drawn characters in this tale, most notably Catania, the tribe's doctor and preserver of ancient medical knowledge. Tribal warfare, sickness and death are portrayed unflinchingly here. The book is divided into short, easily digested chapters, each beginning with an excerpt from Catania's journal. Definitely worth a look if you like books of this genre.

great apocalypse tale

In 1998, humanity learned a cold hard lesson about the interrelationship of the solar system. Comets and fragments hammered Jupiter causing a minute, seemingly statistically insignificant shift in the giant planet's orbit. Insignificant to Jupiter turns out to be colossal to Earth as that almost undetectable shift over two hundred years later has caused a monstrous new ice age on the earth. This wall of ice is so big that almost all of Chicago is buried under it and so wide the North America continent is divided in two. Clans barter, fight, and compete for supremacy in a harsh land. For instance, the Trappers are hunters with some knowledge of the past eke a living in the frozen Colorado Mountains. When barbaric invaders from the north attack, the Trappers flee led by Jack Monroe and Dr. Catania Olsen to the south. They seek peace and domestic tranquilly, but only find a vast wasteland of savageness. Still they keep searching for a better life. SNOWFALL is a great apocalypse tale that uses a real solar event to cause an incredible catastrophe on earth that leads to a deep tale of future survival. The story line is very exciting, as the action never slows down yet readers care about the Trappers, especially the lead duo, whose struggles seem so real. Fans of future dark global calamities will want to revise their short term reading plan by placing Mitchell Smith's tremendous thriller at the top of the to read immediately food chain.Harriet Klausner