The inspiration behind my novel The Ice Bears is that I wanted to pay a tribute to the local hockey team. We only got an ice rink in my home town several years ago due to a citizen petition drive that superseded the requirement of getting the project past our stodgy city council, and another petition approved by overwhelming public support raised the revenue for the project. This city council never met an apartment housing project or a shopping center proposal they didn’t like, no matter what the environmental impact or the effect it might have on the surrounding neighborhood, except when we tried to get a minor league baseball team. They rejected that because alcohol would be served at the games, which tells you their mindset. Then an outside developer put a very minor league baseball team in a nearby small town, and our city’s most active developer became so agitated that he bought a Double AA franchise, moved it here, and convinced the St. Louis Cardinals to adopt it as their AA franchise.
We were supposed to get an Olympic sized ice rink with a seating capacity of 2,000 but the city then decided to build two rinks with almost no seating so one rink could be used for hockey and one for public skating. A minor league hockey team was all set to move in, and public polling had suggested that the city was more excited about getting pro hockey than pro baseball, but the lack of seating caused the hockey team to pack up and head elsewhere. So the local university started a hockey program that became competitive in a very short time. Too bad that the students have to stand along the glass if they want to watch the game because we only have a few hundred seats for spectators.
Our university sports team is nicknamed the Bears, but the hockey team became know as the Ice Bears. It is a great name but I quickly realized that Ice Bears are really polar bears so I had to focus on this double meaning when I began my novel. So half of my story is about a hockey team named the Ice Bears and half of the novel is about the polar bears in the arctic and their struggle for survival in the midst of runaway climate change. The two halves of this story are tied together by the Holt brothers. One is a goalie for the hockey team and the other is a bear biologist working in the Arctic. A third aspect of the story is that I have devoted several chapters showing what the lives of some actual polar bears would be like, not pulling any punches on the portrayals of the harsh realities of life and death in a traditional ecosystem that is in real peril. I think readers may come away with some new realizations on the lives of the sea mammals of the arctic, including polar bears, but I think their respect will only be heightened by an understanding of the brilliant survival strategies of creatures who thrive in such extreme environments.