Piers Anthony - Rings of Ice

Will a canopy formation ever return? Vail concluded that since the Earth now obviously has no ring system, there can never be another canopy. His very close friend, one Captain R. Kelso Carter, felt otherwise. Although Carter’s reasoning is perhaps more mystical than scientific, he did feel that the Earth was destined to experience another canopy formation. For years, the writer of this summary agreed with Vail, that there simply was no source of material in space and no source of energy that would be capable of putting tons of water into orbit at the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere. However, with the perfection of atomic energy, there is now a reasonable energy source. With new-found scientific skills, space scientists could provide a “little” canopy without much trouble at all. In fact, it appears more than ever that Captain R. Kelso Carter was correct. Indeed the canopy can return; the only ingredient missing now is the will to make it happen.

So whether the reinstatement of the canopy occurs by design, by space-scientist error, (or by Machiavellian plot), there may well be a return of the canopy. What then can you and I as ordinary citizens do about it? This novel suggests one response.

Man has experienced the fall of canopies in the past and has survived them, according to Vail’s interpretation of the records. Before ice epochs, man produced some of the most glorious works of art now found on cave walls, to tantalize and mystify us. Similarly, we can stand in awe before such monuments as Stonehenge, speculating that such structures might have been built during the peaceful days when a greenhouse-like canopy covered Britain and other parts of the world as well. This claim takes on new meaning inasmuch as halos appear to have influenced the design and arrangement of the Sarsen Stones of Stonehenge.

The arguments that show this latter conclusion are a little lengthy, and the reader is referred to a paper entitled “Stonehenge Evidence for Halo Phenomena,” that was presented in June 1973 before the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An abstract of this paper appears in the October, 1973, issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The article itself may be obtained by writing “Stonehenge Viewpoint,” 25 W. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93101. There can be little doubt that much of the climatic analysis of the past would be well explained by a modest sized Vailian Canopy. To that extent, Piers Anthony’s novel is less fiction than articulated fact. Perhaps his basic point is that whatever the environmental challenges, the interrelationships between humans will continue to be important. That idea too may be interpreted in fiction but is, inevitably, factual.

Donald L. Cyr