From Amazon.co.uk
Icebones concludes Stephen Baxter's "Mammoth" trilogy about the lives, adventures and rich mythic tradition of mammoths.
Silverhair featured a mammoth family surviving in modern times;
Longtusk backtracked to the Ice Age; now it's AD 3000 and mammoths roam Mars, the Sky Steppe of their ancient legends...
Icebones, daughter of the first book's Silverhair, wakes from suspended animation high up Mons Olympus, the solar system's greatest volcano. Humans ("the Lost") partly terraformed Mars and seeded it with mammoths, but for their own inscrutable reasons have gone home. Already Icebones's untutored cousins, accustomed to being fed like pets, are beginning to starve.
Our heroine's demanding duty is clear. She must make herself Matriarch of the mammoth group, show them how to forage on this alien steppe, pass on the old teaching legends and Just-So stories of mammothdom, and lead her quarrelsome family on an epic trek across the once again dying world, hoping for sanctuary in the lowest of the lowlands.
The shattered geography of Mars is only part of the challenge. Other species are battling extinction: huge predatory cats and birds, a genetically engineered breed of mammoth, and homages to HG Wells and Frank Herbert in the form of deadly red weed and sandworms. Worst of all, abandoned terraforming tools are still erratically active, triggering upheavals of earth, air, fire and water. And at journey's end, an entirely different kind of problem awaits.
With Icebones, Stephen Baxter brings the mingled history and mythology of mammothkind to a satisfying, touching conclusion. --David Langford
From Publishers Weekly
Transported to the Sky Steppe of Mars in the final, satisfying book in British author Baxter's highly original Mammoth trilogy (Longtusk; Silverhair), his engaging wooly characters face an abandoned and potentially lethal terraforming experiment left there by humans (aka "the Lost"). Matriarch mammoth Silverhair's daughter, Icebones, awakens from an unnatural slumber to find herself in a land and time far from her native Pleistocene earth. The mammoths here have no knowledge of their ancient culture, such as the teachings of their mighty progenitor, Kilukpuk. Mammoth tradition says the Sky Steppe is "the Island in the sky where... mammoths would one day find a world of their own, free from the predations and cruelty of the Lost, a world of calm and plenty" yet whatever promise Mars once held is fading now as the changes made by human engineers are reversed under the assault of the red planet's uncompromising weather and geology. Icebones's companions, used to depending on the Lost for everything, can't possibly survive alone. Their only hope is to cross half the world to reach the Footfall of Kilukpuk, a rich valley full of all the sweet grass and water the mammoths need. The journey is long and treacherous, but as the beasts' great Cycle says, "The mammoth dies, but mammoths live on." Baxter fills the tale with taut adventure and splendid settings, making it easy to suspend disbelief.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
