The narrator attributes this looming annihilation of the world to “the collective death-wish, the fatal impulse of self-destruction”(123). According to the narrator, “the defenseless earth could only lie waiting for its destruction, either by avalanches of ice, or by chain-explosions which would go on and on, eventually transforming it into a nebula, its very substance disintegrated” (123). The novel offers a story of compulsive, anal-sadistic pursuit set in a world in which ice is slowly but inexorably taking over the planet. The novel’s surrealist form demands a different sort of reading than that of science fiction driven by narrative causality, but the text’s obsessive insistence on linking the global political violence of the Cold War with the threateningly lethal sexual objectification of Woman and depicting them as two poles of the same suicidal collective will to destroy life makes Ice an interesting feminist literary experiment.

First published in 1967, on the eve of the second wave of feminism, Ice has never been regarded as a significant work of proto-feminist literature, although scholars occasionally include it on lists of sf by women written before the major works of feminist sf burst onto the scene in the 1970s. Wed - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read, ReviewsĪnna Kavan’s Ice is a novel of relentless, evanescent beauty that depicts a world in which two explicitly linked forms of violence dominate and inexorably and insanely destroy it. What’s the Story: Reading Anna Kavan’s Ice by L.

Ice by anna kavan