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.
Themes
Consent and Autonomy in Strange New Worlds
The novel deliberately explores issues around consent and loss of consent, personal choice, and constraint in the context of unpredictable and uncontrollable environments. In particular, the narrative explores the nature and extent of sexual consent. This is key to the novel’s female focus and romance, relationship-based genre and also informs the novel’s wider consideration of personal agency in survival and adaptation.
In the first part of Ice Planet Barbarians, alien captors whom the women refer to as “basketball heads” use rape as a “disciplinary measure” against the women who make noise when they wake to find themselves imprisoned by an unknown species. The violent rape of one of the captives in the book’s first chapters was derided by many readers, who criticized its contrast with the remainder of the book’s light tone, even when characters face life or death circumstances. This scene was sufficiently controversial that it was edited out of the 2021 print re-release of the book by Berkley Books. Yet the absence of an on-page assault does not eliminate the fear of sexual violence that the women face when they consider their initial captors. Rape is presented by the text as the ultimate transgressive crime, one that is far more destructive and dehumanizing in its effect than kidnapping or even death.
When Vektal first approaches Georgie, his khui, the symbiont that allows life on Not-Hoth, identifies her as his “resonance mate,” a category that the novel uses as analogous to the broader “fated mate” trope in paranormal and sci-fi romance. Vektal’s community views the khui in a nearly religious light; its selection of a suitable mate is unquestioned and seen as benevolent. The khui, as Maylak later explains to Georgie, often chooses better than a person would for themselves. This choice (or lack thereof) is framed in the novel more as a point of cultural preference rather than as an essential element of autonomy. When Vektal explains to his fellow hunters that human women expect choice in their partners, he treats it as an odd quirk that should be tolerated and given lenience, even as the assumption that the khui will be the final determinant remains fixed. Even the human women accept this, after some initial discomfort, when faced with death as an alternative. By adopting the khui, the women in effect agree to reduce their future personal agency in the matter of choosing a mate, taking on the sa-khui model of compatibility and consent.
The novel recognizes that choosing an assigned-partner system over death is a constrained form of consent. Here, the text suggests that the specifics of choice (including when and with whom to enter a sexual relationship) are less important than the overall intent of the parties in that sexual relationship. When Vektal performs oral sex on an unconscious Georgie, he does so with the innocent assumption that he is providing pleasure that she, as his resonance mate, will receive happily; when she indicates otherwise, he immediately follows her cues. This framework challenges ideas of appropriate sexual interaction and informed consent, especially as it compares human notions of consent and autonomy with sa-khui sexual morality in the novel’s strange new world.
Advancement and Societal Morality
The novel explores the relationship between technological advancement or sophistication and moral systems in society, especially to challenge the idea that there is a straightforward correlation between the two. The novel sets up a critical juxtaposition between the technologically powerful abductor aliens and the unsophisticated but gentler sa-khui to suggest that technology is not always a force for good. Part of the novel’s emotional and moral development relies on Georgie’s gradual perception of this idea.
When Georgie first sees Vektal, she views him as an “alien barbarian.” This instinctual characterization of “barbarianism” is based in his appearance; he is clothed entirely in furs and roughly made leather clothes. He has taken her to a cave for shelter. Not-Hoth, she quickly comes to realize, does not have any advanced tech aside from the “elders’ cave” that is really a crash-landed spaceship. Even the leather of Georgie’s ill-fitting stolen boots strikes Vektal as impossibly fine and well beyond any craftsmanship possible among his people.
Despite these technological limitations, however, the sa-khui society is quickly established as one that does not have roughness or lawlessness in its values. Instead, Vektal is charitable, generous, and community-minded—and not only toward Georgie, his newfound mate. When they use supplies in the hunter’s caves, Vektal carefully replenishes them. When he learns that there are more human women, he is overjoyed that some of his fellow hunters may get to enjoy the same happiness at finding a mate that he experiences with Georgie. As the novel continues, this community-mindedness is suggested to be not despite the rudimentary technology on Not-Hoth but because of this technological lack. Mechanical simplicity, as Vektal notes when he thinks about killing the sa-khotsk, requires communal effort that would not have been needed if, for example, the sa-khui had long-range weapons like guns.
The connection between technology and the absence of gendered violence is less materially obvious in the text. Yet the implication remains that there is some connection between the two. Vektal considers Georgie’s fear of potential gendered violence to be “not natural,” and despite Raahosh’s choice to kidnap Liz at the end of the novel, Vektal immediately dismisses the possibility that Raahosh will attempt any violence against her. When this surety is contrasted with the extreme sexual violence of the highly technologically advanced “basketball heads” and “little green men” and the tacit understanding that gendered and sexual violence happens on Earth (which is portrayed as a technological “middle ground” between the captors and the sa-khui), a correlation appears. The novel thus suggests that the simplicity of life that is generated by technological limitations promotes a straightforward moral compass that provides a clearer focus on what is important in a society, rather than extraneous or convenient. “Advancement” is thus not presented as an obvious movement solely “forward”; something, the novel suggests, is lost when technology improves.
Using Genre Understanding as Context
The novel uses sci-fi allusions and references as a means to explicate the imagined world and build rapport and verisimilitude in the human characters’ alien experiences. When Georgie and the other women find themselves stranded on a strange planet with no apparent recourse for escape or rescue, they use their knowledge of sci-fi media to process their circumstances. Georgie describes the landscape of the planet like Hoth from Star Wars, leading to the nomenclature “Not-Hoth,” and later laments that she, unlike Luke Skywalker, is not a Jedi who can use the power of the Force to get herself out of a snare trap (which, she will later learn, was set by Vektal).
Indeed, when she and Vektal have one of their early sexual encounters, she frames his physiology as legible, at least within her understanding of fictional contexts. She thinks, “I feel like there’s an alien bingo card somewhere that just got checked off. Horns? Check. Tail? Check. Crazy-ass cock? Check, check, check” (59). This assessment, which tonally conveys both her bemusement and her interest, shows that fiction has given Georgie a way to understand human-alien relations, including their possible sexual connection.
This framework, in which Georgie uses fiction to understand her own (fictional) experiences, offers readers a layer of metatextuality in the novel. To Georgie, her experiences are real and yet sufficiently unreal (or, at least, un-Earthly and inhuman) such that she must turn to a fictional context to understand them. The relationship between reality and fiction that exists within the world of the text offers one layer.
These generic references and allusions create dramatic irony and humor. The women reference existing fiction as if they are themselves real, simultaneously adding to their realistic characterization and highlighting that they are themselves imagined characters. The way Georgie and Liz, an ardent Star Wars fan, engage with sci-fic narratives, references, and tropes is therefore not just a way for her to understand Not-Hoth; it is also a way for readers to read Not-Hoth. Georgie’s reference to an “alien bingo card” therefore, for example, reduces the absurdity and “alienness” of this alien encounter. Sex between Georgie and Vektal may be taking place for the first time, but it is not conceptually unprecedented, not if Georgie can view it as a function of the genre, which is, by definition, recognizable due to the frequent repetition of its tropes and conventions.
Georgie’s invocation of specific sci-fi references also makes Georgie’s past life on Earth believable. The references and memories that the human women discuss about their lives on Earth are disconnected from any emotional ties that would hamper the believability of their “happily ever afters” on Not-Hoth. Making specific cultural references, therefore, allows a shorthand for Earthen origin that cannot be communicated to readers via beloved memories, shared childhood experiences, or other more emotionally laden metrics without sacrificing romance’s golden rule that its protagonists have happy endings.
