Behind the Book: Family on Ice

The book didn’t start with the volcano. It started with the people.

I wanted to write about prehistoric humans and how they lived.

The subject has always interested me, and it let me do something you can’t do in a modern story. These people thought differently. They spoke differently. They lived on different technology. I wouldn’t call them primitive. I’d call them different, and that distinction is the spine of the book. A primitive person is a lesser version of us. A different person is a whole, intelligent human being operating on another set of assumptions, reading the world in ways we’ve lost. That’s far more interesting to write than a caveman who grunts or a modern person dressed in furs.

The volcano came second, out of research. I needed a crisis, an engine to put these people under pressure and force the story into motion, and I found Toba. It’s real and it’s enormous, one of the largest eruptions in two million years. One theory holds that it cut the human population to a few thousand. A near-extinction event, real and catastrophic, and the kind of pressure that shows you who people are. But it’s the setting and the catalyst. The seed is the people, and the volcano is what I applied to them.

What kind of novel is Family on Ice?

This is very much a character-driven novel. There are plot points, because there always are, but the characters drive it and the disaster only leans on them. So the main work was changing my own way of thinking into theirs.

The method was to climb all the way inside the viewpoint and ask: what would I do here, stripped of everything I know as a modern person? Not the survival knowledge, not the science, not the accumulated understanding of how the world works that I never had to earn.

Who am I when I have none of that. That’s different from asking how a caveman would behave, and it produces a different result. A mind that reads as fully human, fully intelligent, and not modern, because it’s my own intelligence running on their inputs and their limits.

It’s the same reason I keep writing from viewpoints that aren’t my own. A cat in Buttercup. A galaxy in Collision with Andromeda. An artificial mind in Peacekeeper. A woman’s sensibility in Complications. Prehistoric people are another of those viewpoints, and maybe the purest one: a human mind separated from mine by seventy-four thousand years. I write these books so I can put myself inside a way of seeing that isn’t my own, and this was the hardest and most rewarding version of that yet.

Why build prehistoric fiction around one family?

Because until very recently, the family was the center of everything.

For almost the full span of human existence, the family was the basic unit, the true meaning of the word tribe at its smallest scale.

Families were large, because child mortality was high. They worked together, played together, spoke together. Everything revolved around the family, and anything outside it was met with suspicion, anything outside the larger tribe with extreme suspicion. That’s how humans organized survival. The lone hero standing against the world is a modern idea. In this world it would have meant almost nothing. A person alone didn’t survive Toba. A family did, or it didn’t.

Centering a lone survivor or a hunting party would have imported a modern frame onto a world that never ran on it. The family is the accurate lens, the actual thing that stood between these people and extinction, and that’s what I wanted to stress. It changes the stakes, too.

When the unit is a family, with children and an old woman and a pregnancy inside it, survival depends on whether this small web of people, the strong and the weak and the young and the old together, can hold and keep moving. That’s a heavier kind of tension than a hero facing danger, because everyone in the web matters and everyone is vulnerable at once.

Why does the family keep taking in outsiders?

Because that’s how people are, and it’s how families grow. It’s how human groups persisted.

Families grow by taking people in. A family sealed off from everyone else collapses in on itself. People marry outside the family, never within it, so a family always has its eye on who might join, and there’s calculation in that. Ideally you bring in another family with some kind of wealth, because the wealth comes with the union. But conditions dictate, and sometimes you take what you can get. In a volcanic winter, with the game gone and groups falling apart, that calculation shifts hard. Who’s alive and useful and willing outweighs who’s wealthy.

So when the family in the book takes in outsiders, even people not quite like them, it’s appraisal and necessity. Sentiment and tolerance have nothing to do with it. Every newcomer gets read as both a possible threat and a possible addition. That was the reality of how families and tribes grew and survived, and I get annoyed with prehistoric fiction that dresses its characters in modern open-mindedness. Leaving the calculation out would have been false to how people are.

What should readers take from Family on Ice?

Life and culture as it was then, seen from inside its own time. Judging it from ours would have been the easy book to write, and I didn’t want to write it.

That’s the discipline behind the book. No modern people in old settings, and no primitives to look down on or romanticize. People inhabiting their own moment, with their own assumptions intact, shown as they were instead of dragged forward into our frame. I’ve done this before from the other direction, in my reimaginings of the Victorian classics, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton, and The Time Machine. The common thread across all of them, and this one especially, is looking at the period and the people and the culture from where they stood, with our own vantage point left at the door.

Family on Ice is the purest version of that discipline. The Victorian books reimagine existing stories inside their period. This one builds a whole world seventy-four thousand years back and refuses to let the modern viewpoint leak in. The reader closes it having been somewhere else, and having met people who were completely human without being anything like modern.

What books are like Family on Ice?

The book it most reminds me of is Alan Dean Foster’s Midworld. Not in its plot, which is science fiction and turns on outsiders arriving to exploit a world, but in its feel, a people bonded to a hostile natural environment, deeply skilled at reading and surviving it, with the home and the family at the center of the tribe.

That last part is the real kinship. Foster’s people organize around the home the tribe lives in, families at the core, and that’s where humans naturally return when civilization breaks down or disaster strikes. You fall back to the family unit, because the family is what was always underneath. The family today is a very different thing than it was even fifty or a hundred years ago. Family on Ice doesn’t argue about that. It shows a way of living organized around the family, at a time when that was how survival worked, and lets a modern reader feel both how human it is and how far we’ve traveled from it.

I think novels that play prehistoric people as grunting brutes insult the ancestors who got our species through that winter. They were smart, tough and loyal to each other in ways that would shame most of us, and I wanted to give them the dignity they earned by surviving.

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