In 1845, an expedition under the command of the experienced polar explorer Sir John Franklin sets off on the ships Terror and Erebus to the northern coast of Canada to search for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean – and disappears without a trace. The search for her dragged on for several decades, information about her fate was collected literally bit by bit, and the picture of what happened is still full of blank spots – although in the fall of 2014 a sensation broke out: after more than a century and a half of searching, the Erebus was finally discovered, and scientists are already preparing to begin studying the remains of the ship, perfectly preserved in polar waters. But a few years before this amazing discovery, Dan Simmons, the famous Author of “Hyperion” and “Endymion”, “Ilion” and “Olympus”, “The Song of Kali” and “The Dark Game of Death”, offered his version of events: the main threat to the expedition was not the crushing embrace of ice, not the cold with a blizzard and not spoiled canned food – but an unknown gigantic monster, as if woven from snow and polar darkness.