Mammoth - Book One - Silverhair

Mammoth: Book One – Silverhair (2000) – Stephen Baxter
Millennium | ISBN: 9781857988499
Condition: Good – Signed Copy | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Mammoths. Enormous, shaggy, magnificent creatures equipped with spectacular tusks, considerable quantities of hair and an unfortunate inability to adapt to a world increasingly populated by humans with sharp objects and ambitious dinner plans. They once roamed the frozen landscapes of the Ice Age in their thousands, apparently unaware that several thousand years later their descendants would be reduced to museum exhibits, children’s toys and the occasional optimistic scientific proposal involving cloning.

But what if some of them survived?

In Silverhair, the first volume of Stephen Baxter’s remarkable Mammoth trilogy, the acclaimed British science-fiction writer turns his considerable imagination towards an extraordinary alternative history of the natural world, telling a story not from humanity’s familiar perspective but through the eyes of the creatures we so enthusiastically helped consign to extinction.

On a remote Arctic island, a small population of woolly mammoths has somehow survived into the modern age. Isolated from the rest of the world, these magnificent animals continue their ancient existence, preserving customs, memories and traditions stretching back through countless generations.

At the centre of the story is Silverhair, a young female mammoth whose intelligence, courage and determination become essential to the survival of her dwindling herd. Her world is one of frozen landscapes, ancient instincts, formidable predators and the constant struggle to find sufficient food without becoming somebody else’s.

Unfortunately, the greatest danger comes from a particularly troublesome species of relatively hairless biped that has developed an alarming enthusiasm for machinery, weapons and interfering with things it doesn’t understand.

Humans, naturally.

Baxter’s great achievement is to construct a convincing imaginative world around the mammoths themselves. These are not simply enormous elephants with winter coats, wandering around waiting for the next dramatic encounter. They possess their own social relationships, inherited knowledge and understanding of the natural environment, creating a fascinating perspective on intelligence and civilisation beyond the human experience.

The novel combines adventure, speculative biology, ecological themes and the melancholy recognition that survival is never guaranteed, particularly when your species has become inconveniently attractive to collectors, hunters and scientific enthusiasts.

There is something wonderfully ironic about humanity’s fascination with extinct animals. We spend centuries helping them disappear, then invest considerable intellectual energy wondering whether we might somehow bring them back. One suspects the mammoths would have preferred that we simply left them alone in the first place.

Published in this 2000 Millennium edition, Silverhair is an imaginative and moving adventure from a writer celebrated for combining scientific speculation with enormous historical and evolutionary perspectives.

This Good-condition copy, offered by Crappy Old Books, is also signed, making it particularly appealing to Stephen Baxter collectors and enthusiasts of speculative fiction.

A splendid journey into a vanished world that, in Baxter’s imagination, has not quite vanished after all.

And a timely reminder that being the largest land animal in the neighbourhood offers remarkably little protection when the neighbours invent rifles.

Especially when you’re carrying around enough ivory to make yourself a walking commercial opportunity.

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