But the marooned seamen are anything but kind. They hunt the mammoths, and not simply for food but for the sheer joy of killing. Silverhair's epic struggle to lead her family to safety turns into a battle between one very determined shaggy elephant and a man obsessed with making Silverhair bend to his will. A wild and woolly adventure Silverhair is a change of pace for Stephen Baxter, a prolific writer of hard science fiction. In Silverhair , Baxter adds an uncharacteristic dash of fantasy to his scrupulously researched depiction of modern-day woolly mammoths by giving the species a richly nuanced language and complex mythology.
Humans figure in the Cycle only as a sort of grim footnote.
The mammoths' plight becomes heartbreakingly desperate, but Silverhair's plodding determination keeps them going, one massive footstep at a time. Readers may find themselves cheering when some slow-moving humans are trampled or impaled on the end of a sharp tusk. Baxter vividly evokes the stark beauty of the mammoths' arctic habitat, a small remnant of an age when mammoths flourished across the continents. The novel's ending seems a bit rushed, with loose ends tied up in one giant glob of exposition. After reading this book I decided I would never eat mammoth steak again.