Search Worlds Without End

In the grand tradition of Watership Down--A saga of the great and gentle ones

It is a harsh but beautiful world--a remote fastness of shining tundra, rimmed by ice and sea and mountain. Silverhair and her kind have lived here from the earliest Rememberings, when Kilukpuk's children first parted some for the jungle, some into the sea, and some into the rock and ice.

Hear their song! For they are the last of the woolly mammoths, the great, shaggy gentle ones whose bones have greened Earth's grasses through the Long Years, for fifty million springs. Hear their story.

Silverhair is filled with the dreams of youth, and the warmth of Lop-ear's child growing in her belly. But even as her life begins, her world is ending around her. A new menace, more vicious than wolf or bear, is descending upon the snowlands--a two-legged creature that kills for joy, and fouls the Earth for greed. Silverhair and the matriarch, Owlheart, must escape across the glacial torrents, beyond the saw-toothed mountains. They seek help and find it in unexpected sources, including the distant cousins who long ago found their destiny in the green arms of the sea, and from an enemy: an ice-faced menace known as...the Lost.

Stephen Baxter, one of today's most acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy, now turns his celebrated talents to a tale that has never before been told or even imagined. Silverhair begins a three-part saga--at once thrilling, heartwarming, and tragic--of a small band of mammoth survivors on a remote arctic island, and what happens when they are discovered by a clever and unpredictable animal they call the Lost.

Silverhair is a story for every age, a tale to remember as long as the footfalls of the great and gentle ones still echo in the shadow of the glaciers--forever.

Even as a young calf, Longtusk understood the hardships the few remaining of his ancient kind had encountered when the glaciers retreated and grassy forests stole over the vast tundra the herds called home. Worst of all was when the Fireheads came -- cruel, two-legged beasts who kill for pleasure. At a tender age, Longtusk became their prisoner, hobbled, abused, and stripped of his freedom. But through toil and terror, Longtusk never forgot his Clan -- and he carried crucial, intimate knowledge of the Fireheads' ways, though at a terrible price.

Now the time is rapidly approaching when he will have to clash with those who seek to destroy every living trace of his proud breed. The dark land before him will be mined with fierce obstacles and awesome challenges. And though it may require the ultimate sacrifice -- and a grim confrontation with the Lost, the most feared enemy of his gargantuan race -- Longtusk must not shun the twisted path in front of him... or what he is destined to become: the greatest hero of them all.

3000 A.D. Years ago, humans colonized Mars, bringing with them specimens of long-extinct Earth life for regeneration on this new frontier. But humankind has disappeared, and the animals have been left behind to fend for themselves. Icebones, daughter of Silverhair, had been the only adult mammoth taken to Mars. As such, she is now the only one of her kind who carries the accumulated knowledge of mammoth history, and it is up to her to teach her fellow mammoths how to survive -- and thrive -- without their human keepers.

In the grand tradition of Watership Down, Stephen Baxter has created a complex society complete with elaborate myths and legends. With Icebones, he brilliantly and dramatically brings the acclaimed Mammoth trilogy to its resounding conclusion.