Ice. - 1970

New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,, 1970. Ice overruns the world - "one of the high points of science fiction" (Aldiss) First US edition, first printing, of the author's last novel and masterpiece, "a classic surreal novel of existential catastrophe" (Anatomy of Wonder); a lovely copy in the jacket. Often contrasted with Ballard's Drowned World, Ice depicts "a world jarred into ecocatastrophe by political and scientific crimes" (Lethem). "Ice represents one of the high points of science fiction... [it] is a catastrophe novel that goes as far beyond Ballard as Ballard is beyond Wyndham, sailing into the chilly air of metaphysics" (Aldiss, pp. 336-7). This is the first edition to print the introduction by Aldiss, who praised it as the best science fiction novel of the year; it is preceded by the scarce UK edition (London: Peter Owen, 1967). Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered and blocked in white. With the pictorial dust jacket. Spine ends a trifle bruised, cloth bright and clean; light shelfwear to jacket extremities, a couple nicks to foot of spine; a near-fine copy. Anatomy of Wonder, 3rd edn, 4-293; Locke II, p. 67 (both 1967 UK edition). Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction, 1986; Jonathan Lethem, "The Cool Disturbances of Anna Kavan's 'Ice'", New York Times Book Review, 27 October 2017.