Icefall: The Rise of the Nine

“Dynamic characters headline this exhilarating fusion of action and alien horror.”
—Kirkus Reviews

A team of superbeings are all that stands between Earth and total annihilation at the hands of a predatory alien species.

An alien ship crashed into Alaska’s Mendenhall Glacier 150,000 years ago and froze within the ice…until glacial melting thawed out its deadly inhabitants in the present day.

Kai and Jules Bevins, both professors of astrobiology at Caltech, are roused from their home and whisked away to the site where a special division of the army has taken charge. But not before something escaped through a breach in the hull.

Meanwhile, a pair of Alaska state troopers locate a missing Amazon driver fifteen miles away on the Juneau Icefield and trace his movements to a nearby village with a population of less than fifty. Arriving in town, they are greeted by the bodies of villagers who were killed in an impossible, horrific way.

Thousands of miles away, under a remote archaeological find in Pakistan, the Nine—a team of superbeings placed on Earth a million years ago by intergalactic colonizers that seeded our planet to create human life—are lifted from their long slumber. The kind of threat they’ve been waiting for has finally come.

The Nine find unexpected allies culled from the ancient history of their home world in the form of a teenage boy and godlike entity. All this leads to a confrontation on a volcanic island that will determine the fate of civilization, even as the Nine uncover the shattering truth behind their own tragic paths and learn of a much greater battle to come.

Will they be enough to stem the apocalyptic menace threatening all of mankind?

Michael Newman is an entrepreneur and storyteller whose fascination with science, technology, and the human spirit drives his debut novel, Icefall. Written in collaboration with bestselling author Jon Land, Icefall launches an epic science-fiction thriller series exploring humanity’s connection to forces beyond comprehension and the cost of survival in an age of awakening.

A lifelong creator of companies and ideas, Newman brings the precision of a strategist and the imagination of a world-builder to his writing. He lives in Northern California with his family, dividing his time between new ventures and the worlds he creates on the page. 

www.michaelnewmanauthor.com | @mnewmanauthor on X, Instagram, and TikTok

Jon Land is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling, award-winning author of nearly seventy books, including the critically acclaimed, award-winning Caitlin Strong Texas Ranger series. He has also teamed up with Heather Graham for the science fiction series The Rising, Blood Moon, and the forthcoming Dark Harbor. In recent years, Jon has transitioned further into the collaborative writing space. Among other titles, he penned the bestseller White Robes and Broken Badges which won the 2025 Andy Award for Narrative Nonfiction—the highest honor a collaborative title can receive. He has also penned fifteen others currently published or pending collaborative titles.