Ice Station Nautilus

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I hope you enjoyed reading Ice Station Nautilus!

This was both a fun and difficult book to write, in that it allowed me to explore a region where submarines do not routinely operate, taking the reader both above and below the ice. Although I have not operated below the ice, I was fortunate to have visited a base camp atop the polar ice cap a few years ago while two submarines were shooting exercise torpedoes at each other, and I assisted with the torpedo recovery through the ice. I broke my hand while I was up there, and I’d like to say it was while saving the ice camp by wrestling a polar bear, but the truth is less exciting.

There are a lot of technical issues I did not explore in Ice Station Nautilus. I only scratched the surface with respect to the issues USS North Dakota’s crew would have to deal with if trapped beneath the polar ice cap without power. You could write an entire book covering the plethora of problems that would arise and how they would need to be addressed, plus there are issues with reactor cooling and recovery that make my head hurt when I think about them. Addressing every issue and how each would be resolved would have bogged Ice Station Nautilus down with technical details that are more appropriate for a nonfiction book on the topic rather than a novel, where the focus is plot and pacing.

Also, some of the tactics described in Ice Station Nautilus were generic and not accurate. For example, torpedo employment and evasion tactics are classified and cannot be accurately represented in this novel. The dialogue also isn’t 100 percent accurate. If it were, much of it would be unintelligible to the average reader. To help the story move along without getting bogged down in acronyms, technical details, and other Navy jargon, I simplified the dialogue and description of shipboard operations and weapon systems.

For all of the above, I apologize. I did my best to keep everything as close to real life as possible while developing a suspenseful, page-turning novel. Hopefully it all worked out, and you enjoyed reading Ice Station Nautilus.