Don Wilcox’s The Ice Queen

Don Wilcox’s short novel The Ice Queen was published in Fantastic Adventures in January 1943. It’s a lost civilisation tale, my absolute favourite genre.

The Ice Queen takes place in the 19th century. Jim McClurg is an artist. He’s been hired to make a visual record of a polar expedition organised by Lady Lucille Lorruth. Five years earlier her husband disappeared in the Arctic while on a fur-trading expedition. Lady Lucille would like people to think that she believes her husband is still alive and that the object of her expedition is to find him. Jim suspects that she’s only interested in those furs. In his final communication Lord Lorruth claimed to have collected a vast number of furs, worth a rather large fortune.

The brig Aurora is commanded by Captain French. He drinks a lot and does not appear to be very honest. It’s not clear whether Lady Lucille is angling to marry the captain for the sake of his fortune (he’s a rich man) or whether the captain is angling to marry Lady Lucille for the sake of that fortune in furs.

Jim is mostly interested in the girl on the tiger. She’s very pretty, she looks like a Viking maiden, she rides a pure white tiger and she’s been shadowing the Aurora. This is impossible of course. The girl cannot exist. And yet she does exist.

There’s a stowaway who knows far too much about this frozen wasteland, and seems to know all about the girl. She is apparently a queen. We later find out that her name is Veeva.

There are unexpected dangers in the Arctic. Huge ice bubbles appear from nowhere. Several members of the party are imprisoned in these bubbles. It is possible to dig one’s way out but they’re very disconcerting, and the worry is that an ice bubble forming over the ship might sink it.

There is also a strange lost world in these frozen wastes. Possibly a very ancient world although its origins are unknown even to the inhabitants. This lost world holds the answer to the disappearance of Lord Lorruth.

A complication is that every male member of the expedition is hopelessly in love wth the beautiful young ice queen while Lady Lucille sees her as a deadly threat.

The trick with lost civilisation stories is not just to make the lost civilisation interesting, but believable as well. There have to be plausible explanations for the strangeness of such a civilisation. Wilcox succeeds rather well on both counts. Veeva’s icy realm is strange but it makes sense. Even the fact that Veeva claims to be 22,000 years old makes sense. And the sleeping king ends up making sense. It all hangs together.

There’s a suggestion of menace about Veeva’s realm, but it’s a subtle menace. Veeva appears to be good-natured and cheerful. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the expedition members to be afraid, and yet there’s something slightly sinister about it all.

There’s a suggestion that Veeva may have access to certain powers, possibly technological and possibly magical, and that technology or magic may be behind some of the mysteries of her kingdom, but it’s left nicely vague and ambiguous.

This books ticks all my boxes. I love lost world stories and I love adventure, horror or science fiction stories in polar settings. And how could anyone not love a pretty young heroine who rides a huge white tiger whilst wearing furs, a metal breastplate and a Viking helmet?

The Ice Queen is very pulpy but it has plenty of atmosphere, danger and excitement and it’s hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I know almost nothing about Don Wilcox (1905-2000) other than the fact that he was American and his writing career seems to have been confined to the 1940s and 1950s. I have read another of his novels, Slave Raiders from Mercury, and it’s very pulpy but quite enjoyable.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Poul Anderson’s The Sargasso of Lost Starships in a two-novel paperback edition.