Subject: REVIEW: "Ice Station", Matt Reilly

From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor" <[email-masked]>
Date: 28 Nov 2000 13:25:10 -0500

Ice Station, Matt Reilly
	    Review Copyright 2000 Robert M. Slade

This is a thriller.  An action thriller.  A military action thriller.
Lots of action: the type of plot that the phrase "one darned thing after
another" was invented to describe.  Lots of fancy new martial gadgets.
Military technology is not my field, so I have to trust the author about
all these wonderful weapons.  But I don't have to trust him too far,
especially when so much else is flatly wrong.

There is an attack by a local pod of killer whales.  Of course, there is
the problem that resident killer whales eat fish, and it is only transient
populations that go after large marine mammals.  Then again, Reilly talks
about orcas fifteen feet long weighing five tons, so the characters in the
story probably aren't in any great danger from such rolly porkers.  Or the
thirty foot, seven tonner that must be emaciated to the point of terminal
illness.  The assaults seem to be copied from fictional accounts of shark
attacks and bear almost no resemblance to how orcas actually hunt or feed.
Orcas do chase prey into shallow waters and even onto beaches, but I doubt
it would work that well on catwalks.

Then again, if you were to try and distract a pod of transient killer
whales, a seal -- even the sea-lion-like antarctic fur seal -- would be a
poor choice.  For orcas that do feed on marine mammals the seal might
almost be considered a favourite food.  A small advantage in agility is no
match for an animal that can lift a seal, and an extra few hundred pounds
of water, several feet into the air with one flip of the flukes.

The real howler, though, was when one character, as the monster was about
to chow down on him, felt a "rush of warm air" from its gaping mouth.
Whales, of course, breathe through their blowholes.

If you have sufficient flammable gas in an area to ignite, there is an
explosion, not nicely defined gouts of flame.  But that probably wouldn't
be a problem with "highly flammable chlorofluorocarbons," mainly because
chlorofluorocarbons aren't highly flammable.  In fact they were, and
sometimes still are, used in fire extinguishers.

Did I say that I had to trust Reilly for the military technology?  I was
wrong.  A "nitrogen charge" about the size of a hand grenade might hold a
cup of liquid nitrogen, if you were lucky.  Poured directly onto some
particularly fragile small item you might do some damage, but splashed
around a room (particularly by an explosive, and therefore exothermic,
charge) it wouldn't do much.  A litre or two of liquid nitrogen dumped out
on the floor will merely do a very good job of cleaning up gum wads and
certain types of grease stains.  Liquid nitrogen wouldn't be a very good
weapon in any case: it's very cold, but it has a low specific heat.  An
amount you can carry in your hand would hardly be able to freeze several
thousand tons of sea water.  Splash it on exposed skin, and nothing much
happens except that the nitrogen evaporates.  I've put my hands in liquid
nitrogen, deliberately, and while I wouldn't want to leave them there
indefinitely, I'm still typing with all ten fingers.

Oh, and liquid nitrogen is not "gooey."  And, Matt, I think the word you
were looking for is "epoxy."  Neither is it blue.  Although liquid oxygen
is a rather nice sapphire colour.

Should I talk about hovercrafts with brake and accelerator pedals, that
suck air (and objects) *in* from underneath the skirt, and then cartwheel
like Indy cars with a blown tire when a fan goes bad?  No, if I do I'll
get depressed.  Same goes for aircraft that still have fuel in the tanks
after decades and, without any indication that construction was even
finished in the first place, manage to work right the first time they are
fired up.  I also have a considerable problem with a fighter aircraft that
are both capable of carrying a nuclear power plant and having the range to
make it from Antarctica to pretty much anywhere.

Then there is a diving bell that seems to be permanently open on one side
while it goes up and down from the surface to 3,000 feet like a yo-yo.
Having an opening on the bottom isn't necessarily a problem, but the
changing pressure would mean that the airspace would shrink to one percent
of the original volume on the way down.  If you pumped in more air (or gas
mixture) to keep it clear at depth, then it would be venting bubbles all
the way up.  However, there is one great advantage to a diving bell that
is open at the bottom: there is no pressure differential, so it can't
explode.

The abundance of solar flares does seem to correlate with increased
sunspot activity, but a flare is not a sunspot; quite the reverse.  The
problematic "radiation" in solar flare activity is not ultraviolet: if it
were, it would take eight minutes to reach the earth and then be gone.
The major difficulty comes from heavily ionized gas plasma.  And that
cannot be aimed with relative pinpoint accuracy from 93 million miles
away.

I was glad to see some recognition that email has to travel over the same
transmission paths as any other means of communication.  It's too bad that
nobody ever thought of the fact that email can be queued up and sent
whenever an opportunity presents itself.

%A   Matt Reilly [email-masked]
%C   175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY   10010
%D   1999
%G   0-312-97123-0
%I   St. Martin's Press
%O   212-674-5151 fax 800-288-2131 [email-masked]
%P   513 p.
%T   "Ice Station"

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
[email-masked]  [email-masked]  [email-masked] [email-masked]
Vizzini: You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most
         famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia
                                                - The Princess Bride
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev    or    http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade