Score 0-571-51961-X on sale, parts for hire

PREFACE When Captain Cook returned to England in 1775 after a four-year voyage throughout the southern hemisphere, he had finally laid to rest the long?held belief in a southern continent inhabited by a cultivated race of humans: I am now well satisfied no continent was to be found in this ocean but must lie so far south as to be wholly inaccessible on account of ice. Two hundred and twenty three years later, on November 6th, 1998, Cook's assertion was suddenly called into question. After a freak eruption of Mount Erebus in the Trans?antarctic range, a curious artefact was found by scientists amongst the debris: a book, miraculously spared by the heat of the blast. Scholars immediately set to work trying to decipher its contents, as it was written in an unknown language and printed in a strange script. They soon came to the conclusion that it was nothing other than a guide?book to the city of Hon, one of the seven or so metropolises on a civilised antarctic continent. The book seems to have been written in about 1756, and it describes in exquisite detail the city's life-style, with its thriving trade, magnificent buildings, colourful religious and political ceremonies, the phenomenal imperial gardens and the picturesque, buzzing university quarter. The author also refers frequently, and with growing alarm, to certain ancient myths prophesying the end of their civilisation through being covered by an annihilating, impenetrable coat of ice, a calamity calculated to take place some fifteen years after the date of publication. Interestingly enough, none of the common folk interviewed in the guide (chiefly soldiers, gardeners, artisans and coffee?shop owners) set any store by these predictions. Alas! They seem to have come true (and, by coincidence, only a matter of months before Cook's voyage) ? but something of that lost society can now be glimpsed through the freakish survival of one tantalising document. This is that book.