50 pages • 1 hour read
Ruby DixonIce Planet Barbarians
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Not-Hoth
The setting of Not-Hoth is a symbol of alienness and unfamiliarity, especially of the ways in which these elements can be both negative and positive at different times.
At first, the brutal weather conditions of Not-Hoth act as a form of secondary antagonist in the novel. While the cold atmosphere is technically survivable by humans, Georgie notes it continuously as she travels through the barren landscape, looking for some way to help her fellow women. Even after she connects with Vektal, who grants her more climate-appropriate clothing, the physical makeup of Not-Hoth provides obstacles for the text, including crucial dilemmas. In particular, the unbreathable nitrogen-like element in the atmosphere means that humans will die within a week of living on the planet if they do not accept the khui symbiont.
Despite its harsh weather and unfamiliarity, Not-Hoth is also, to Georgie and some of the other women including Liz, a site of considerable natural wonder. They are amazed and somewhat alarmed, for example, by the sight of the sa-khotsk, which is described in terms similar to prehistoric mastodons, albeit with distinctly alien features like four eyes and numerous long, spindly legs. Once the women have accepted the khui, Not-Hoth transforms from being a death sentence to a place where, despite its constant cold, the human women can find happiness.
Khui
The khui is a symbiont that makes life on Not-Hoth possible. It provides the living creatures inside of which it lives with greater resistance to the cold, increased healing abilities, and bright blue, glowing eyes. When the sa-khui hunters cut the sa-khotsk heart open to reveal the many khui within, Georgie cringes to realize that the symbiont she must accept to survive resembles a blue, glowing worm.
The khui propels the novel forward in multiple ways. First, it’s “resonance,” or the vibration and intense sexual arousal it causes when it identifies a mate, initially draws Vektal to Georgie, which leads to their sexual and eventually romantic relationship. Resonance occurs to promote pregnancy; Georgie finishes the novel expecting a sa-khui-human child. Because resonance “chooses” mates for the sa-khui—and chooses, as Maylak explains to Georgie, better than a person might choose for themselves—it has a nearly religious connotation among the sa-khui. This characterization is given nuance by the way the sa-khui also describe it as merely a part of themselves; Maylak likens it to another organ.
The khui (or the humans’ lack thereof) also provides narrative tension by offering a timeline; if the humans do not get a khui shortly after their arrival, they will die due to the element in Not-Hoth’s air that they cannot process without the symbiont. In reverse, the “khui-sickness” that the human women suffer due to their lack of khui makes the decision about staying on Not-Hoth easier, as they find themselves too weak to even contemplate staying to potentially fight their returning captors.
Elders’ Cave
The elders’ cave is a spaceship, crashed many centuries prior, that the sa-khui have come to accept as part of their landscape due to their lack of recognition of digital or space-age technology. Georgie, however, recognizes it as a ship and can interface with the computer that still operates, despite its many years frozen on Not-Hoth. The computer is able to give her a “zap” that lets her instantly learn the language of the sa-khui, facilitating communication between the human arrivals and the sa-khui people. Narratively, this eliminates the confusion between the two romantic leads as their connection deepens, which makes the novel’s argument that Georgie and Vektal are a good romantic match more compelling, as it shows that that their connection goes beyond physical attraction. As such, the elders’ cave computer acts as a deus ex machina that the other sa-khui hunters use to also be able to understand English, which sets up the promise that Liz and Raahosh will be able to speak to one another in the following installment in the series.
