Hyperborea

"Hyperborea: Migrations" is the first book of a two-part science fiction series dealing with the colonization of Hyperborea, a planet on the far side of the galaxy, by Earth corporations in the twenty-third century. When communication with the home planet is lost and a volcanic eruption destroys the colonists' city, the survivors are forced to make a new life in a forbidding environment. With the temperature constantly below zero and most water trapped beneath volcanic rock, the Hyperboreans can only survive near geysers and thermal vents. Even the use of fire is lost for lack of combustible materials, along with every technological advance that had once been supplied by the home planet. Long after the eruption, only a few thousand people survive, dwelling in crude stone huts constructed over thermal vents. In the tiny settlement of Good Hope, life is preserved by two haphazard sources of nourishment: large underground tubers that are tended by miners forced to work in total darkness, and protein scraped from the backs of a giant, sluggish, indigenous species, the domesticated "blumps." Life follows simple rituals, and almost all memory of Earth origins has been lost. Every year in the warmest season, the herders must lead their animals on the Migration in search of meager pasturage on the frozen land, alert to the attacks of a large predatory species, the fiendish "crabs" that emerge from holes to ambush and feed on the helpless blumps. In such a tenuous existence, even a minor catastrophe might doom the Hyperboreans to extinction. Only Nora, the last representative of a disparaged social class known as the Teachers, can still read the few documents that survive from the original colony, and only she still believes that human beings once lived in a far better place. In their efforts to cling to life in the brutal climate, the people of Good Hope have come to worship a fertility figure called The Big Mother, and to believe that human beings originated in the depths of the volcano that destroyed the old Earth colony long before. Reserved and anti-social, Nora is resigned to her solitary life and back-breaking work in the tuber mines, until one day she meets Desh, a younger, more exuberant Teacher from a distant settlement. Forming an awkward alliance, Nora and Desh stand in opposition to The Guide, a charismatic figure who likewise knows the power of books and words, and who manipulates the gullible Hyperboreans with promises of a warm, comfortable afterlife in a spirit world. When climate disaster, crab attacks and a massive quake threaten human survival in Good Hope, Nora must convince her backward, superstitious fellows that their best hope lies not only in defiance of The Guide, but also in an expedition across the waterless Eastern Plain, in search of a new home in the farthest reaches of Hyperborea. This expedition, led by Nora and Desh, will be described in the second book of the series, "Journey to Erebus."