The most recommended ice age books

As a climate activist and lover of glaciers and glaciation, I took a special interest in David Archer’s book, The Long Thaw. Archer takes us in and out of ice ages, explaining with surprisingly understandable prose just how ice ages are formed, their predictable cycles, why they’re important, and how with current climate change trends and impacts, we just may have missed the onramp to the next one. That could put us into a Hothouse Earth scenario not seen since the times of the dinosaurs. Archer masterfully brings science to the layperson. If we think that the year 2100 is a marker in the sand for climate change, think again. Archer reveals that the chilling (or heating) reality of climate change just might be forever. 

I am awed by the ambition of this book, which really does cover everything suggested by the title. 

The author is a Professor of Archaeology at Oxford and as his bio says he also worked as a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum there, so his expertise is clear. 

He writes with a very broad sweep, and his arguments that key elements of magic can be traced across wide spans of time and space might be controversial – but this book is a huge and fascinating treasure trove of information. 

For anyone who wants to know about the history of magic I think this is a great place to start. 

Finally, expanding outward even further in space and time and going far beyond my Clash of Eagles series source material, Tim Flannery’s book covers the entire geological, ecological, and (yes) human history of the North American continent, from its formative years 65 million years ago through to its “discovery” by Europeans, and the effects those colonizing influences had on the peoples, flora, and fauna. I learned so much from this book that I still think about it almost daily, and especially so when I travel around today’s US in all its depth, breadth, and glory.

I love the main character, the strongest woman in literature, who, in late Paleolithic times, literally invents the modern world. She is strong but thinks herself weak. She is beautiful but thinks herself ugly. She circumvents and overcomes every instance of adversity thrown her way. I want to be her, and the book permits me to wear her shoes.

I have been highly influenced by Jean Auel’s storytelling, especially the graphic scenes of Ayla’s loss of innocence, growth into sexuality, and descriptions of lust, love, and completion.

This book is not erotica, yet the love scenes are the best I’ve ever read and are a roadmap to create tension and heat in my writing. With her influence, my audience laughs, cries, and cheers their way through my books.

In the late 1990s when this book was published, it seems no scientist had ever given serious thought to the consequences for human evolution of the submergence of Sundaland in the aftermath of the last ice age. There is compelling scientific evidence, compiled and analyzed here in compendious detail, that Sundaland was a heartland of human innovation and that its drowning may have led to the spread of rice agriculture, pottery making, and even tales of lands being ‘fished up’ (as by the Pacific demigod Maui). An astonishing read that today I still regard as largely credible.  

My son loves this book because of the pictures. They are funny and do a great job illustrating the story of life on Earth and how it evolved. 

My son also wants me to mention that he appreciates the specific examples it gives as he feels it does an excellent job of teaching evolution (which is a very precocious thing to say). To his credit, he can explain evolution to me, which I don't think I could do at his age. 

Many heroic characters are not flashy. This is the way I like to cast them in my novels. The principal characters in this fast-moving SiFi novel are that way. The story is revealed using a first-person approach, each chapter being in the voice of a particular character. I like the breezy nature of the dialog that allows emotional depth to gradually make an impact without getting bogged down in psychoanalysis. While the earth is frosting over with a new ice age and civilization grinds towards an uncertain future, national alliances are forming with the associated grasping and competition for limited resources. A genius scientist is tasked to find an answer and the author rightly avoids a deep dive, instead taking broad leaps across technological chasms. However, this novel gets you thinking about what you might do under similar circumstances.

There’s a lot of thoughtless talk by techno-optimistic philosophers about futures in which we all get to become superintelligent and live for thousands of years if we can apply the right tech to ourselves.

Sykes describes fascinating research on the Neanderthals, beings who were almost, but not quite, us. Reading her book, I wondered what it might have been like to grow up as the child of a union between a Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal. I found this especially useful when we consider future relationships between people determined to remain human and others who want tech to make them posthuman ASAP.

There’s so much information to gleen from Sykes to help us guess at how posthumans might treat beings whom they view as different and possibly inferior.

If you’ve ever wondered what life was like for the people living in the Americas after the last ice age, then read this book. Through the eyes of Young Hunter, we explore what we now call New England thousands of years before the first Europeans crossed the Atlantic. And through Young Hunter, we learn to use weapons, how to survive in the wild, Native American folktales and names, and we learn why Young Hunter’s people fear beings called the Ancient Ones. All of these worldbuilding layers are revealed as Young Hunter embarks on a dangerous journey tracking the creatures that attacked his people, with each layer drawing you in until you are as fearful of the Ancient Ones as Young Hunter and just as determined to face them.

Hapgood was a lecturer who used the bright young minds of some of his graduate students to make a detailed study of a pre-Columbian map drawn in 1513 by a Turkish Admiral by the name of Pirie Re’is. Rei’is had drawn his map using source maps made by Alexander the Great and even earlier peoples. It is of the Atlantic showing the Americas correctly drawn and placed. There is an ice-free Antarctica where the correct outline of the coast of Queen Maude land is less than 7 miles out of place. Hapgood’s similar analysis of other maps shows that there had been a global civilization on this planet sometime in the past.