Maximum Ice (Bantam Spectra Book)

Zoya Kundara has lived on the space vessel Star Road for two hundred fifty years. As its Ship Mother, kept alive in a state of pseudoimmortality, she has provided wisdom and counsel to succeeding generations of its crew, self-exiled survivors of earth’s great plague.

But now, to escape the ravages of space radiation, the giant starship has returned to earth, only to discover a world on the verge of extinction, its barren surface blanketed in a crystalline substance that resembles ice and that is slowly, inexorably encapsulating the planet. Zoya is chosen as emissary to this strange new earth, and now she must approach its denizens and find a suitable home for her desperate crew among the shrinking lands.

But what she finds shakes Zoya to her core: groups of humans huddled like moles in underground techno-warrens called preserves, and a pseudospiritual order known as the Ice Nuns, who seek control of the physics-defying crystals and enslave their disciples in their crazed quest for truth. For on this once green land, Ice and the science behind it are now the only God–and mastering this grand ecology of information the only higher calling. Allies are few and far between, but somehow Zoya must uncover the secrets of Ice and halt its expansion.

That is, if the snow witches don’t get her first...

Kay Kenyon sold her first science fiction novel, The Seeds of Time, to Bantam in 1997. Within a few years she left a career in consulting to become a full-time writer. Several subsequent novels were short-listed for such awards as the Philip K. Dick (Maximum Ice) and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (The Braided World.) Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies such as Fast Forward 2, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and Shine, An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. In  2007 the first book in her sci-fantasy quartet, The Entire and The Rose, was published by Pyr. Publishers Weekly listed book one, Bright of the Sky, among the top 150 books of the year. The series (rounded out by A World Too Near, City Without End and Prince of Storms) has twice been shortlisted for the American Library Association Reading List awards. The four books  are available in trade paper, Kindle, and Audible.com versions. Bright of the Sky is free on Kindle. Kenyon is a founding board member of the Write on the River writers' conference in Eastern Washington. She regularly writes on fiction topics and the writing life at her blog, Writing the World.