Ice Station
A great roller coaster of a thriller. Scarecrow leads a crack team of Marines into Antarctica for what is believed to be a UFO buried beneath the ice. Before arriving there are several mysterious deaths and a French incursionary force to contend with, then the British SAS arrive followed by other foreign teams all set to kill for the secret UFO or else blow everyone and it up. It's a race against the elements, a race against time and a race against everyone who wants the UFO. What is the mystery of the UFO? Will the mysterious deaths be solved? Will Scarecrow and his team survive? This awesome book is hard to put down, so set aside a weekend and go for it!
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2018–2025years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You really should read Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. It's so bad its good. It has an attack killer whale the bites off one of the characters legs after launching itself meters into the air.
- > If you were to discover an alien spaceship laying under the ice in Antartica
A fair few things this could reference, but I'll use it as an opportunity to recommend reading the least likely option which is the book Ice Station by Matthew Reilly.
- I enjoy reading, but I've always struggled with it, particularly with larger, slower-paced, and more complex books (though it's never stopped me). I suspect I have pretty strong aphantasia [1] and so I never build mental images of the characters or their scenes, rather I only remember abstract descriptors about everything. I find that this makes it hard for me to follow storylines and in particular multiple story arcs in multiple different locations or timeframes. I think that this does impact the level of joy I get from reading, and envy those who get a rich tapestry of mental images from the stories.
I found, for example, Matthew Reilly's Ice Station a relatively easy story when I read it as a teen because the pace was high and the action was contained to a relatively simple scene. On the other hand, I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver right now and I'm really struggling to follow the story arcs because it jumps all over the place with its characters, scenes and timeframes. The fact I'm already familiar with most of the characters' names helps some of it stick, but I'm resigned to most of the secondary Royal Society characters being a generic conglomeration of traits and just treat them as a supporting cast without defined personalities in a lot of ways.
I find that I also very quickly forget the contents of novels I read. I read Snow Crash about 5-8 years ago and then again earlier this year, and I barely remembered any of it. Certainly I think more stuck the second time, but it was still mostly new to me (e.g. the character concepts and biggest plot points kind of stuck, but nothing more).
I sort of hope that reading can help me improve with my memory, but it hasn't in about 25 years of reading (I'm in my early 30s) so I don't hold particularly high hopes. I do wonder whether the aphantasia would've been even worse had I not read so much when growing up, but maybe if it hasn't noticeably improved in my life then equivalently it would never have been any worse had I not read. I wonder if my brain in some ways reflects an illiterate person in the visual cortex areas?
On the other hand, reading is undoubtedly the reason my vocabulary and spelling is as good as it is. Certainly, it's is a very valuable skill and I am glad that I continued to engage it since I learned to read as a child.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
