Silverhair

By Stephen Baxter

Book Overview

In the grand tradition of Watership Down --A saga of the great and gentle ones It is a harsh but beautiful world--a remote fastness of shining tundra, rimmed by ice and sea and mountain. Silverhair and her kind have lived here from the earliest Rememberings, when Kilukpuk's children first parted some for the jungle, some into the sea, and some into the rock and ice. Hear their song For they are the last of the woolly mammoths, the great, shaggy gentle ones whose bones have greened Earth's grasses through the Long Years, for fifty million springs. Hear their story. Silverhair is filled with the dreams of youth, and the warmth of Lop-ear's child growing in her belly. But even as her life begins, her world is ending around her. A new menace, more vicious than wolf or bear, is descending upon the snowlands--a two-legged creature that kills for joy, and fouls the Earth for greed. Silverhair and the matriarch, Owlheart, must escape across the glacial torrents, beyond the saw-toothed mountains. They seek help and find it in unexpected sources, including the distant cousins who long ago found their destiny in the green arms of the sea, and from an enemy: an ice-faced menace known as...the Lost. Stephen Baxter, one of today's most acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy, now turns his celebrated talents to a tale that has never before been told or even imagined. Silverhair begins a three-part saga--at once thrilling, heartwarming, and tragic--of a small band of mammoth survivors on a remote arctic island, and what happens when they are discovered by a clever and unpredictable animal they call the Lost. Silverhair is a story for every age, a tale to remember as long as the footfalls of the great and gentle ones still echo in the shadow of the glaciers--forever.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061051322
• ISBN13: 9780061051326
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: Harper Voyager
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

More than just a Mammoth storey

Read the trilogy decades ago and decided to reread. Stephen Baxter has a way with words and the second reading did not disappoint. Loved the hierarchy dynamics.

really fast

this book arrived really quickly and in great shape and was a joy to read

Well I liked it, at least.

Graphic violence, torure, death, hardship - well, maybe, but still well written and exciting and pacey throughout.

Something different

Fans of Stephen Baxter's science fiction may be surprised by this venture into unexplored territory. "Silverhair" is the first of three books in a series which promises to provide a novel and thought-provoking diversion from his previous work.Silverhair is one of the last of her kind: a woolly mammoth. Long thought to be extinct, these relics of the ice-age have somehow survived eons of change in a remote, isolated "lost world". Legends passed down through the Great Cycle of mammoth history tell of their flight to this last sanctuary, and the great danger from which they fled: the Lost. Now the Lost have once more discovered the existence of Silverhair and her kind. Silverhair must find some way to reconcile thousands of years of mammoth existence with the advent of humanity, or face the end of the Great Cycle- the death of her species.The theme of conflict between humankind and nature is as old as the human race; the telling of stories from the perspective of animals scarcely less so. In Baxter's expert hands, however, these elements are interwoven to produce a book that touches a rarely-explored space in the mind.If "Silverhair" has a flaw, it must be the briefness of the story- the pace at times seems incongruously swift, jolting the reader out of the synchrony produced by Baxter's otherwise excellent characterisation. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the book left me with a desire to re-enter the world of the mammoths and explore their culture further.Baxter creates the legends, social structure and emotions of these majestic animals with a vividness which evokes both a deep resonance with the familiarity of their thoughts and feelings and a sense of wonder at the complete alienness of their nature. Beautiful and brutal, this book yields a glimpse into the mysteries of the long-forgotten past and speaks to the wildness buried in the human soul.

Wooly Mammoths

This is a book about a remnant population of wooly mammoths which have survived on an island well into the modern era. It is written from the mammoths' point of view, and is similar in some ways to Watership Down and The White Bone. The mammoths face the erosion of their habitat and gene pool, and encroachment by a group of brutal men.