I do not love mountaineering. I do not like watching it, I do not like reading about it.

I loved this novella.

(Note: I am friends with the publisher, but that hasn’t impacted on my attitude.)

There is SO MUCH going on in this story, I’m not sure where to start. Obviously I’ve started with the fact that it involved mountaineering… but that doesn’t tell you much. This isn’t just a story about climbing mountains, it’s about an unbeaten mountain on a harsh planet, and it’s about the joys of climbing as well. I don’t understand those joys, but I got a glimmer of an idea about them from reading this.

There’s only so much mountaineering I would read, though, even from the greatest writer. What really sucked me in here is both the relationship between the characters and the voice of the narrator herself, Aisha. Her relationship with her wife, Maggie, seems straightforward and then slowly reveals all of those complexities and unexpected difficulties that characterise real relationships. Their interactions were loving and troubling and selfish and selfless… how they would react to each other was always a bit ambiguous, to me, and that definitely contributed to the tension.

Aisha, as the narrator, is the person in whose head the reader spends most time, and she’s an appropriately complex person. I loved that Gunn gives us flashbacks to establish a pretty profound backstory for her after we already have a sense of what she’s experiencing in the now. She’s dealing with old injuries – mental and physical – and she has to watch her beloved risk herself on that damned mountain, while also carrying around some old guilt and questions about identity and worries for the future. Basically I just wanted to sit there and pat her hand to make her feel a bit better about the world.

This is a novella, so it doesn’t take long to read. Which is a tragedy, but it also means it’s tightly paced – a few slower, character-driven parts, but always with the knowledge of time passing urgently in the story’s now. Gunn has put a lot of thought into the universe-building that just gets lightly touched on – just enough to make this seem very well-realised. I can well imagine more stories in the broader universe… and possibly more set on Icefall itself. Which I would read, but I may need a bit of space before doing so.

Definitely recommended. Buy here.