50 pages • 1 hour read
Ruby DixonIce Planet Barbarians
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6, Chapter 20 Summary: “Georgie”
Georgie struggles to stay annoyed with Vektal when he is clearly overjoyed at the thought of them having a child together. She is surprised to find herself satisfied by the idea of having a child with Vektal, despite not consciously choosing this. They approach the crashed ship; the hunters with them all received the “zap” from the elders’ cave the night prior and can now speak English. Georgie worries over Raahosh’s urgency to get this “zap,” cautioning Vektal to watch him for excessive advances toward the women.
Georgie wants to enter the crashed ship first but lets Vektal go ahead of her when she remembers her pregnancy. She is relieved to find all the other woman alive, though she is shocked at their weakness. As the sa-khui help distribute food and water to the ailing women, Georgie hears the sound of someone resonating, unhappy when that person hides it. Georgie explains to the women about learning the sa-khui language via the elders’ cave and how the women must decide whether to take the khui and make a life on this planet or try to wait for their captors to return and fight them.
The women lean toward taking the khui and staying, even after Georgie explains resonance. When they prompt Georgie for her opinion, she confesses her pregnancy, which leads them to tease her about how quickly this has transpired. They decide to stay on Not-Hoth and wake the six women in the pods.
Part 6, Chapter 21 Summary: “Vektal”
Georgie tells Vektal that she and the other women intend to stay, news that he receives with joy. She cautiously explains how there are women sleeping in the pods and then tells the story of her abduction. Though she worries that Vektal will be angry about her keeping the other six women a secret, he considers this “an unthinkable bounty” that will safeguard his people from extinction, given their unequal gender ratio (160). She cautions that some of the sleeping women may elect to not take the khui.
The women rouse the six in the pods, comforting them as they come to recognize their bizarre situation. The hunters struggle to be patient, eager to see the women after a lifetime of assuming that a partner and family was an impossibility for them. Raahosh reports a large sa-kohtsk nearby, and they plan to take the women closer to it in the morning so that they may each get a khui. Liz protests that the newly awake women need more time to decide. Kira collapses, clutching her ear. She reports that the captors are returning imminently.
Part 6, Chapter 22 Summary: “Georgie”
Georgie struggles against feeling frustrated with the “new girls,” who are weepy and disoriented. She is distracted by pain in her arm; when Kira’s sensors alerted them of the arriving captors, the women sliced the objects out of their arm, fearing that they had tracking capabilities. The trackers were dumped near metlaks; Georgie hopes that the captors will be attacked.
The ground trembles with the approaching sa-kohtsk. The weakened women hide, at Vektal’s command, in a copse of trees, watching as an enormous creature that Liz calls “Jurassic Park shit” emerges (166). As the hunters attack en masse, Georgie fears for Vektal’s safety. She watches as Vektal swings at the creature and kills it. Georgie rushes to embrace him.
The women gather as Vektal butchers the large creature. They are all horrified except Liz, who likens this to butchering a deer, albeit a very large one. Vektal removes the creature’s heart, which is writhing with glowing, blue worms. Georgie cringes as she holds the khui, which “feels like a sticky strand of spaghetti” (171). Despite her disgust, she lets Vektal make a small incision in her neck and place the khui against it. The khui burrows inside in a sickening sensation, and Georgie faints.
When she wakes, Georgie can no longer feel the khui and notes that she no longer feels cold. Vektal reports that her “eyes are a lovely shade of blue” and that all the women successfully took a khui (171). He praises her bravery for going first. Her khui “sings” in resonance, causing her to experience intense sexual desire for Vektal. Several of the other pairs have resonated, but Vektal is confident that they will progress slowly while the women get accustomed to the situation. He tells Georgie that Raahosh has kidnapped Liz: It was his khui that Georgie had heard resonating on meeting the women. Vektal reassures Georgie that Raahosh will not hurt Liz but has taken her away in the hope that she will accept that their khui have made a match.
Georgie and Vektal find a private place to have sex. Georgie intrigues Vektal by pointing out that her lack of tail means that it is possible to have penetrative sex with him positioned behind her. They halt intercourse when they see a spaceship hover over the crashed ship. It stays there for a while and then vanishes. They resume their sexual encounter and then speak happily about their future together. Georgie is pleased when Vektal reports that they will only ever resonate for each other; his people “mate for life” (179).
In the last portion of the novel, Georgie reimagines her future with Vektal on Not-Hoth, spurred to visualize this by the realization that she is pregnant. While she is initially shocked by a pregnancy, which she had assumed impossible between species, she quickly adapts to thinking positively about a future child with Vektal.
Part 6 Analysis
In some ways, the novel’s conclusion follows the traditional pattern of romance novels: the “happy ever after” based around a permanent relationship and family life. The conclusion of a romance novel with a pregnancy is a controversial topic among romance readers, however, as is part of the novel’s complex exploration of Consent and Autonomy in Strange New Worlds. While this trope allows readers to see a different form of familial happiness for the characters, others argue that it orients “happy endings” in the concept of reproductive futurism, which has been socially mobilized as a sexist force that suggests that women can only be happy through motherhood. The world building that Dixon puts forth for her series virtually guarantees pregnancy as a type of endpoint for each of her heroines, however; the khui, as a symbiont, chooses mates based on a reproductive compatibility that happens to include interpersonal compatibility. Its ultimate goal, however, is reproduction and species continuation. It is notable that there seems to be no form of contraception or reproductive choice available to the women, linking with the theme of Advancement and Societal Morality.
Even with motherhood on her personal horizon, however, Georgie remains committed to the notion that she will agree to whatever the human women collectively decide regarding their plans for the future. This community-mindedness is framed as something that makes Georgie a good leader, rather than focusing on the ways it could, potentially, put her future offspring at risk, as Georgie refuses to steer her companions away from the option of taking their chances with the “little green men.” The tension of this decision forms part of Georgie’s characterization, as the narrative has already set up the conclusion that the human women will to decide to stay.
This decision is ultimately not one between the “basketball heads” and the sa-khui. Rather, it is one between the “basketball heads” and the hostile climate of Not-Hoth. This draws the narrative attention back to the idea of what is survivable and what is strictly necessary to make life livable. The book gives serious attention to the idea that constant, brutally cold temperatures could make life so unbearable that risking further danger is a preferable option. Even if the women decide against this, it is framed as a debate worth having, albeit briefly. At the novel’s end, accepting the khui is portrayed as a leap of faith that is highly rewarded; by choosing to stay and accepting the symbiont, the human women find that the worst conditions of Not-Hoth are nullified and that they have been granted acceptance into a kind, welcoming community as a result. This resolution fits with the generic expectations of the narrative and sets up the next novel in the series.
