Ice: 50th Anniversary Edition

　　在這個被災難蹂躪的末日之地，所見之處盡是毀壞，政府倒下了，軍方接管了一切，並且，極端氣候使得世界陷入沒有盡頭的嚴冬。



　　一個不知名的敘事者踏上了一場如夢似幻的旅程，去尋找他曾經迷戀、至今仍無法忘懷的女人──有著一頭白色長髮的「冰雪少女」。他橫越凍寒的海洋與陸地，搜尋毀敗的城鎮和被洗劫一空的房舍，只為了趕在世界被冰封之前，將她從她掌控了整個國家的的軍人丈夫、如獄卒般的獨裁者手中解救出來。



　　然而當我們跟隨著「他」的腳步深入故事，敘事者自身卻似乎早已迷失在夢境和幻覺中，分不清楚現實和虛幻的界線……。



　　1967年出版的《Ice》是Anna Kavan生前最後一部發表的小說，亦是她最知名的作品，描繪了一個進入後核戰時代般的末日世界，在當時突破、撼動了科幻小說的框架。這部小說風格獨特、充滿魅力，背後所探討的主題內涵豐富，不僅是對氣候變遷的預言、對冷戰下全球政治情勢的隱喻，也是對暴力與創傷的女權主義關懷，並且，亦很大程度反映了Kavan自身與海洛因成癮對抗的內外衝突。



　　《Ice》不單是一部傑出的科幻作品、是現實世界與文學國度的相互映照，也是一個孤單靈魂徘徊於真實與幻覺間的噩夢與希望。(文/博客來編譯)

A dazzling and haunting vision of the end of the world, Ice is a masterpiece of literary science fiction now in a new 50th anniversary edition with a foreword by Jonathan Lethem

＂One might become convinced that Kavan had seen the future . . . A half century after its first appearance, Kavan’s fever dream of a novel is beginning to seem all too real.＂ -The New Yorker

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape, destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world and secretive governments vie for control. Against this surreal, yet eerily familiar broken world, an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest for a strange and elusive ＂glass-girl＂ with silver hair. He crosses icy seas and frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, all to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden and save her before the ice closes all around. A novel unlike any other, Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction, a prescient warning of climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, a Kafkaesque literary dreamscape, and a brilliant allegory for its author’s struggles with addiction--all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow.

Kavan’s 1967 novel has built a reputation as an extraordinary and innovative work of literature, garnering acclaim from China Miéville, Patti Smith, J. G. Ballard, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Lessing, among others. With echoes of dystopian classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and J. G. Ballard’s High Rise, Ice is a necessary and unforgettable addition to the canon of science fiction classics.

＂One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.＂ --J.G. Ballard

＂There is nothing else like it.＂ --Doris Lessing

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Anna Kavan (1901-1968) was born Helen Woods. She began her career writing under her married name Helen Ferguson, publishing six novels. It was only after she had a nervous breakdown that she became Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, with an outwardly different persona and a new literary style. Much of her life remains an enigma, but her talent was none the less remarkable, and her works have been compared to that of Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and Franz Kafka. Kavan suffered periodic bouts of mental illness and long-term drug addiction--she had become addicted to heroin in the 1920s and continued to use it throughout her life--and these facets of her life feature prominently in her work. Her widely admired works include Asylum Piece, I Am Lazarus, and Julia and the Bazooka (published posthumously). She died in 1968 of heart failure, soon after the publication of her most celebrated work, Ice.

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, and of the essay collection The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.

Kate Zambreno is the author of the novels Green Girl and O Fallen Angel, as well as two works of experimental nonfiction, Heroines and Book of Mutter. She is at work on a series of books about time, memory, and the persistence of art. She teaches in the writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.