Review by Duncan Lunan

Fragment is billed on the cover simply as ‘a novel’, and perhaps it should be read less as SF than as a thriller, where scientific plausibility sometimes takes a back seat.  Nevertheless it has suddenly become topical, because the world’s largest iceberg, A23a, visible from 800,000 miles at the Sun-Earth L1 point  (Fig. 1)  has broken free and is menacing the coast of South Georgia, the island on which Britain’s claim to a large part of Antarctica depends, whose capture and recapture was pivotal in the Falkland Islands conflict.  See for example Graham Bound, A Falkland Islander’s Wartime Journal,  Surviving the Siege,  Pen & Sword Books, 2022. 

A23a  (Fig. 2)  broke away (‘calved’)  from the Filchner Ice Shelf in 1986 and because most of its mass is below the surface, it remained stuck on the seabed for 30 years, next being trapped in a rotating seawater flume  (Fig. 3), but as of January 23^rd, it was only 173 miles from South Georgia. 

Although the iceberg is shrinking, down from 3900 squ, km. to 3500, roughly the size of Cornwall, if it rams the coast of South Georgia it will cut penguin and seal colonies off from their feeding grounds  (Fig. 4).  This nearly happened in 2023, and did happen in 2004 with severe consequences for wildlife  (Georgina Rannard, Erwan Rivault, ‘Giant iceberg on crash course with island, putting penguins and seals in danger’, BBC News, Science & Environment, 23^rd January 2025).

It has to be stressed that stopping anything like A23a is totally beyond human capability.  In 1959- 1960, the U.S. Coastguards’ International Ice Patrol set out to destroy a small berg by bombing it from a Grumman Albatross – the same aircraft which was in use by the USAF Air Rescue service at Prestwick.  (Fig. 5 – see ‘Eyewitness to History:  Mercury Capsule, Glasgow Student Charities Week, 1964’, ON, August 21^st, 2022)  – to see if they could keep hazards out of the shipping lanes:  but high explosives only blew chips off  (Fig. 6), and incendiaries just glazed the surface without even altering the overall shape.  

The Daily Express had photographs of the operation at the time, but I haven’t been able to locate them.  The chastened Coastguards admitted that to destroy bergs in a hurry, even nuclear weapons might be ineffective, ablating a layer off the surface but leaving the main mass untouched, especially because most of it is below the waterline.  The iceberg that sank the Titanic suffered no significant damage apart from a red streak of paint  (Fig. 7).

But although A23a makes Fragment topical, it doesn’t necessarily do much for its authenticity.

As I read it, I was reminded several times of Clive Cussler’s Raise the Titanic, which is about the race to find a ton of an unknown element, hidden in the ship’s strongroom, which is so radioactive that it could power the lasers of an entire ‘Star Wars’ missile defence system.  The problem was that if it had so high a rate of decay, by the time you dug it out of the secret mine in Soviet territory you’d only have half a ton, by the time you got it to the boat, quarter of a ton, probably one-sixteenth by the time you got it to the Titanic and nothing worth mentioning by the present day.  In both cases, I have a strong urge to cry ‘I don’t believe it!’

The ‘Fragment’ of Craig Russell’s title is actually the whole of the Ross Ice Shelf, which breaks free due to simultaneous avalanches on four of the glaciers that feed into it.  I have a bit of difficulty with that – the Shelf hasn’t formed as a unit and I doubt that it would behave as a single huge plate ‘the size of France’, if it was given a single shove or even four simultaneous shoves along its edge.  There’s no proper explanation as to why the four events happen simultaneously, just a vague reference to ‘a kind of resonance in the bedrock’, and a throwaway statement at the end of Part One that the Fragment is man-made and ‘has entered the world of its creator’, by which we’re presumably meant to understand that the avalanche that triggered the rest was due to Global Warming.  Or something else.  Back in the 60s, it would have been nuclear testing;  but with this degree of vagueness, it’s no more scientific than the ‘magnetic radiation’ which blows up the Moon in Space 1999.  Nevetheless, I loved the scene in which a TV reporter is trying to get some sense out of a Presidential scientific adviser, appointed for the political correctness of his views on Intelligent Design, who doesn’t know the difference between Newton and Darwin and thinks that the First Law of Motion is an unsubstantiated hypothesis. 

Once the Fragment gets moving, it gains momentum from the prevailing wind and current with what seems surprising speed – I would have expected an ice mass of that size to create its own weather and currents, rather than merging so smoothly into the existing ones.  I have even more difficulty with the episode in which the Fragment rides unstoppably over the Falkland Islands, so fast that onlookers can’t out-drive it, rather than piling up against the coast as A23a is expected to do if it hits South Georgia.  Remember that most of A23a’s  mass is below the surface, and while its top looks flat in Fig. 2, it’s all caves and crags at the waterline  (Fig. 8), and there must be huge projections below.  But what happens when the Fragment comes up the Gulf of Mexico and blocks the mouth of the Mississippi is a lot easier to credit.  It’s described in detail, but rather hurriedly, because the novel’s main plot has meanwhile run its course elsewhere.

As the tsunamis from the original avalanches run along the Antarctic coast, the only survivors from the British and American bases are a small group of scientists who are rescued by a nuclear missile submarine, a last-ditch deterrent whose mission is to destroy Russia if World War III is irrevocably lost.  The Captain and crew are so dedicated to the secrecy of their mission that they compromise it with extreme reluctance, and having taken the British survivors on board, they treat them as potential spies and beat them up if they’re found talking to the crew.  Still, we’re asked to believe that the skills of those survivors are just what’s needed for the sub’s sonar expert, whose hobby is whale songs, to translate the songs into visual images, and they overcome the ship’s security to do it –  after which it’s supposedly easy to translate human speech, with all of its context-dependence, to and from the totally different experiential basis of the whale language, consisting entirely of sound-pictures.  Of all things in this book, that’s what I found hardest to believe, even as fiction.

It turns out that the whales’ sonar is so sensitive that they maintain a complete sound-picture of all the world’s oceans, constantly updating it via the songs.  It’s so sensitive that they can pinpoint all conventional submarines, and even deduce the positions of the highly stealthed missile ones by the gaps which their super-baffling systems leave in the picture.  If the whales talk to the Russians, the latter could pinpoint all the missile-carrying subs and take them out in a first strike.  On being told of this, the Captain leaps to the conclusion that this means the end of the submarine arm of the US deterrent.  Even though the speed of sound in water is much greater than in air, it would still require a cooperative whale to be close enough to a US sub to detect it, tell the Russians, and for them to react, before the target sub has gone somewhere else… but perhaps unsurprisingly, since they’re portrayed as time-serving idiots, the advisers to the White House don’t think of that.  It leads to a hilarious scene where a hectoring US President, clearly based on you-know-who, tries to lay down the law to the whale spokesman on the matter and gets told to do the next best thing – all of it in sound pictures, remember.  James Morrow would have done a great job of this as satire, but Craig Russell does his best to make us take it seriously.

In 2016 I seemed to be writing a lot of Victor-Meldrew-style reviews.  Covering Stephen Baxter’s Massacre of Mankind sequel to The War of the Worlds, I had to point out how much post-World-War-1 technology could and should have been developed in anticipation of a second Martian attack 20 years later.  As regards Fragment, so far I’ve thought of five ways to beat the supposed threat to US security:  take the acoustic baffles off all US subs, so the whales can’t tell which ones are carrying the missiles;  put out lots of cloaked decoys;  put the subs in hardened natural shelters, like Sweden’s, until their final-strike capability is called for;  keep them in shallow waters where whale sonar gets confused;  put them in the Great Lakes… And all this assumes that the whales will side with the Russians, when they’ve only just learned that people control ships at all.  But the response of the President is that since all whales can pose this threat, but only one knows they can do it, kill that whale at once.

Reviewing William S. Dietz’s Into the Guns  (ON, 10^th March 2024), I found it unbelievable that a relatively minor natural disaster would cause the US armed forces to fragment and hire themselves out to crime lords, right-wing fanatics and anyone else who sees it as an opportunity to overthrow the Constitution, starting by getting rid of the Acting President.  (Designated Survivor on Channel 5 had just tackled a similar theme very much better.)   This time, we’re asked to believe that the Captain is so relieved that he might be out of a job, that he forgets his oath to his Supreme Commander, and despite his earlier reluctance to compromise his secret mission to save human lives, he refuses the President’s command to kill the whale.  And all of his crew back him, except one officer who tries to seize command and is quickly put down as a mutineer, though he is actually the only one obeying orders.

The 4-minute version of Hamlet contains the great throwaway line, ‘Meanwhile, another of the characters is conquering Denmark…’   Similarly, in this novel, meanwhile the Fragment is moving remorselessly north, destined to cause more destruction than a nuclear exchange, wherever it ends up.  Nobody believes that, although to my mind it’s far easier to believe than the four paragraphs above.  Never mind:  it’s good fun, it’s well written, and some of the scenes I’ve highlighted are real gems.