I just finished reading Jacek Dukaj’s novel ICE, published in Polish in 2007; the English translation was published for the Kindle in November 2025 (although the hardcover will only be published in January 2026). It’s a stupendous novel, extremely long and dense — the hardcover publication will be 1200 pages long — and very difficult to summarize. It could be regarded both as science fiction and as alternative history.
In the world of this novel, everything changes (or diverts from actual history) with the Tunguska meteor strike of June 30, 1908 (an actual event, but with consequences in the world of the novel that it did not have in the actual world). Radiating out from the impact site in Siberia, large portions of the northern hemisphere freeze and are covered with ice — an eternal winter. This ice is frozen water, but has new and weird properties, such as apparent life forms made of ice, with internal flows of liquid helium as a sort of equivalent to blood, Together with the ice, a new element called tungetitum appears in the ground, and new technologies are developed that incorporate this new metal, making alloys of it with steel for instance, allowing adaptation to the extreme cold.
As a result of this transformation, history takes a different path than the one we are familiar with. In particular, World War I does not take place, and the Russian Revolutions of February/March and October/November 1917 do not take place. Radical change has been suppressed by the ice. The Tsar is still in power in Russia, and Poland has not become independent but instead is still part of the Russian empire.
The world of the ice is a sort of inverted world, with its own chemistry and physics, referred to within the novel as “black physics”. For instance, chemical reactions that would release heat under normal circumstances instead cool off the surroundings, for instance. This results in all sorts of metaphysical consequences. In actual physics, there is no force of coldness; rather, cold is defined negatively as the lack of, or reduction of, heat. But it seems that, in the world of ice and tungetitum, coldness itself is a positive force. The laws and properties of this new form of matter are investigated by Nikola Tesla, the actual engineer and inventor, who becomes a major character in the novel’s fictional world.
Beyond this, the differences are defined in terms of mathematical logic. In the actual world — the world of Summer, in the language of the novel — situations are ambiguous and hard to define; this needs to be handled by a three-value logic instead of by the traditional (Aristotelian) two-valued logic. A statement about what will happen in the future, for instance, is neither true nor false. Here Dukaj refers to “the Polish school of logicians and mathematicians (so called the Lviv-Warsaw School)”. (I am here citing an interview with Dukaj about the novel). The realm of the Ice, or of Winter, in contrast, is the home of traditional two-valued logic: everything is frozen into place, locked into its “soletruth”, so that ambiguities are abolished, and every proposition (or statement about the world) is unequivocally either true or false. Though this situation is stated directly in the text, or argued over by the characters, it is also demonstrated via the numerous situations and occurrences that populate the novel.
The protagonist and narrator of the novel is a young Polish mathematician, Benedykt Gieros?awski, who is sent from Warsaw to Siberia to make contact with his father, a former dissident who was exiled to Siberia for illicit political activities, and who is believed to have connections with and power over the Ice. During the first third of the novel, Benedykt travels east on the Trans Siberian Railroad, interacts with the other passengers, and experiences the ambiguities of Summer. Finally he arrives at the Siberian city of Irkutsk, frozen into eternal Winter; the remaining two thirds of the novel take place in and around this city.
Benedykt is an unsual character; though he is not insubstantial (if anything, he is way too substatial, locked into a particular perspective which might not be objectively accurate, so that we experience all the problems of dealing with an unreliable narrator), he is skeptical, among other things, of his own existence, or at least substantiality , This is reflected linguistically with in the novel itself: the narrator never says “I” until the last several hundred pages. Instead, he refers to himself impersonally; this seems bound up with overwhelming experiences of shame and inadequacy. Dukaj conveys this linguistically, apparently, through the use of reflexive forms in the Polish language that have no equivalent in English. The translator, Ursula Phillips, works out equivalents in ingenious ways (the novel includes an appendix where Phillips describes how she dealt with multiple translation issues). For most of the novel the narrator in English never says “I did” such and such, but instead describes his own actions using a tenseless imperative. e.g. (to give a random example): “fasten the warm sale-collared overcoat, pull on the gloves, step down onto the platform”.
The first-person “I” finally appears in the last section of the novel, when Benedykt has overcome his feelings of inadequacy to the extent of becoming delusional about his own powers and possibilities. (I won’t discuss this in any detail so as not to give away the major narrative developments of the final quarter of the novel).
The translator makes similar choices in order to convey the additional linguistic oddities of the original Polish. Dukaj self-consciously adopts the form of the 19th-century Russian novel, which is the reason for its longueurs and its somewhat archaic diction: again, all this is conveyed indirectly by the linguistic choices of the translator, and explained in the appendix; even before reading this explanation, howver, I still felt the slight but discomfiting strangeness of the writing, a sort of deliberate stiltedness that is nonetheless compelling.
I will not try to discuss the themes and metaphysical implications of the novel, because just after a first read I am still puzzling over them. I will just say that truth and power alike are continually under contention as the novel moves between its two poles: the oppressive absoluteness of Winter and the equally oppressive ambiguity of Summer. I will be thinking about this novel for a very long time; though due to its length I will not endeavor to reread it any time soon. Long novels tend to either repel me (if I do not find them interesting enough to occupy me for the time it takes to read them) or to obsess me, due to the way they expand into complete worlds of their own; ICE definitely falls for me into the latter category.