A "painted novel" by Gregory Manchess first published in 2017, Above the Timberline chronicles the journey of an explorer stranded in the frigid ruins of the old world, a son determined to rescue his father, and a woman trying to uphold a tenuous peace between her family and her adopted home.
1,500 years ago, a polar shift coincided with massive tectonic disruption to spell the end of the old world and the beginning of a new ice age. Mankind has since clawed its way back to a second industrial era, and the race is on to rediscover and exploit the incredible lost technologies buried beneath the ice. Leading this charge is the Polaris Geographic Society, a conglomerate of adventurers and explorers all vying to make the next big discovery. Galen Singleton is one such PGS adventurer, whose many daring exploits and magnificent findings out in the frigid wastes have made him the envy of the PGS and a hero to everyone... except his son, Wesley.
When Galen disappears while searching for a mythical lost city buried beneath the snow and the PGS wash their hands of the matter, Wesley takes it upon himself to mount a rescue effort. With the bare minimum of support from a friend of his father, Wesley sets out into "The White," hoping to arrive at the coordinates his father encoded in a secret message before the unforgiving landscape claims either of their lives.
But the cold isn't the worst of Wesley's problems — he'll have to contend with packs of ornery wooly rhinos and hungry snow leopards; Solon Kai, a power-hungry Tukklan chieftain determined to derail his search; and a sinister threat that followed him from home out onto the ice. He finds allies in Linea, a Tukklan native to the White who has her own reasons for standing up to Solon Kai; a secretive commune of monks hidden away on the tundra whose goals align with Wesley's; and a pack of supernaturally intuitive polar bears.
Tropes in Above the Timberline:
- Adventurer Outfit: Wesley wears his pilot's outfit (including the leather cap, goggles, and bomber jacket) while exploring the frozen tundra. Even after getting a more practical long coat from the Shadow Moon Monastery, he keeps the hat. His father Galen wears similar garb even after being stranded in the hidden city for half a year.
- Adventurer's Club: The Polaris Geographic Society — under the veneer of dashing explorers who bravely charge into the frigid wastes to recover lost technology and knowledge of the old world, the PGS is a boy's club whose members are largely self-serving egoists jockeying to get their names in the headlines. When Wesley approaches them about mounting an expedition to rescue his stranded father (a prominent PGS member), none of them are interested in finding Galen Singleton.
- After the End: Overlaps with Cataclysm Backstory. The world ended in a spectacular Natural Disaster Cascade... but that was 1,500 years ago. Humanity has since regained an industrial footing and has started to excavate the ruins of the old world to rediscover ancient technological secrets.
- Apocalypse How: Class 2: Planetary Scale, Societal Collapse, caused by the combination of a Glacial Apocalypse and Artistic License – Geology — but that's in the distant past. The story takes place 1,500 years after polar reversal and worldwide tectonic disruption destroyed the old world, and mankind has clawed its way back to Steampunk levels of technology.
- Artistic License – Geology: The story takes place in a world where the Apocalypse How of the past was partially caused when "Earth's mantle spun faster than its crust, causing plates to break loose and float above the magma," cracking along fault lines and crashing around like bumper cars. Once the dust settled and humanity regained an industrial footing, explorers started to venture into the frigid, unmapped wastes hoping to stumble onto old cities buried beneath the snow. The hope is that with enough data, they'll be able to track the path of the hyperactive tectonic disasters of the past and locate where the largest cities (with the best plunder) of the old world came to rest.
- Bears Are Bad News: Polar bears are one of the greatest threats to explorers, and Wesley mentions that his military academy even offered a course on surviving encounters with the beasts. Ultimately it's a polar bear that kills Wilkes, shoving him off a ledge to a Disney Villain Death.
- Beary Friendly: The polar bears of the Shadow Moon Monastery are intelligent and friendly towards the monks and their companions, including Wesley once it's made clear he's traveling with Linea. On several occasions they save Wesley from blizzards, snow leopards, and eventually from Wilkes.
- Braving the Blizzard: As Wesley and Linea search for the hidden city with their polar bear guides, they have to make haste before a blizzard overtakes them.
- Cataclysm Backstory: Overlaps with After the End, the cataclysm being a Natural Disaster Cascade that wiped out modern civilization and buried much of the "old world" beneath ice and snow.
- The Chief's Daughter: Linea might have been raised at the Shadow Moon Monastery, but she is the daughter of Solon Kai. The matter of her upbringing appears to be the cause of some conflict between Chief Kai and Tau.
- Clockworks Area: The portion of the city hidden in the mountain where Wesley and Galen reunite is full of massive gears the size of a building — it's Wesley's first clue that the city isn't really a city, but an engine.
- Covers Always Lie: The cover art is taken from one of the last scenes in the book, only with Linea painted over and one of the bears photoshopped closer to Wesley to cover the gap.
- Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit: Wilkes' legions of Faceless Goons wear diving helmets with dark lenses.
- Disney Villain Death: Grim punts Wilkes off an unfenced ledge and he falls into the depths of the city, a drop of at least 15 stories if Wesley's earlier estimation is correct.
- Dread Zeppelin:
- In the prologue, Galen's zeppelin the Indomitable is attacked by the Adamant, a stealth zeppelin that gets the drop on the crew. Though crippled in the attack and about to crash, Indomitable takes the Adamant down with it.
- Wilkes and his men fly a Blackhawk M738 stealth airship into the White to track Wesley. Solon Kai uses it to transport his men to the Shadow Moon Monastery to menace Tau and the other adherents. The ship is drawn with headlights that resembled angry eyes.
- Dreaming of Times Gone By: Downplayed — Both Wesley and Galen note in their journals that they've been having dreams of a "green earth." Their dreams have no bearing on the plot.
- Faceless Goons: Wilkes' men wear long brown coats and diving helmets with dark lenses while trooping around in arctic conditions.
- Ghost City: Galen and the PGS are searching for a lost city rumored to be buried beneath the ice. The buried city of Arcturus is totally empty of people when Galen finds it. He hypothesizes that the inhabitants all used a wormhole to travel to another planet.
- Glacial Apocalypse: The "polar shift" component of the Natural Disaster Cascade that ended the old world resulted in "the tropics becoming the poles and the poles becoming the tropics," with some locations buried under miles of snow. That being said, every location shown in the book is coated in snow, even the PGS headquarters and the military academy Wesley describes. Galen writes in his journal that he can get the PGS to trade fresh fruits with the Tukklan, but he's baffled by the old-world farming equipment unearthed on his expeditions and there's no mention made of where the PGS are sourcing that produce.
- Goggles Do Nothing: The diving helmets with tinted lenses worn by Wilke's Faceless Goons serve no identifiable purpose.
- I Have Your Wife: Wilkes takes Wesley's mother Elizabeth hostage to ensure the boy's cooperation. There's no mention of what's become of her when Wilkes follows the Singletons out into the White.
- MacGuffin: The Arktos Device, which Galen and his wife hid away from the world after he recovered it from a dead explorer. When Wesley tells his mother he's going to mount a rescue expedition and find his lost father, she asks him to bring the device to Galen. Wilkes wants the device because he believes its the key to finding the lost city. The device provides no aid in locating the lost city, and when Wesley finally delivers it to his father, Galen suggests that the device was used by the inhabitants of the lost city to calibrate a machine for creating wormholes through space.
- Mammoths Mean Ice Age: Wooly rhinos are a threat to explorers out in "the White," and Tukklan tribal leader Solon Kai rides one into battle.
- Mighty Whitey: The monks of the Shadow Moon Monastery searched for the lost city for the last 400 years and found nothing. The Tukklan have lived in the tundra-like landscape since the disasters that ended the old world, and even they have no idea where the city is. It takes the white-coded explorers Galen and Wesley to locate the city — Tau even tells Wesley he believes the boy is the fulfillment of a prophecy.
- Military Academy: Downplayed — Wesley was attending Military Academy until his father's disappearance. Graduating early gave him the opportunity to mount a solo expedition to find his dad, and he mentions several of the skills he learned at the academy in the early phase of his search.
- Mysterious Antarctica: Zig-Zagged — tectonic disruption and a "polar shift" have left much of the world mired in a Glacial Apocalypse. Every setting that Wesley travels through resembles the arctic.
- The Native Rival: Downplayed — Linea mentions that Zhuan of the Shadow Moon Monastery has asked her to "bind their hearts" (i.e. marry him) multiple times. She was prepared to do so in an effort to broker peace between the tribes of her father Solon Kai and the monks of Shadow Moon Monastery, but as soon as Wesley turns up she immediately falls for him.
- Natural Disaster Cascade: The combination of a polar reversal and worldwide tectonic disruption caused a Class 2 Apocalypse How.
- Nearly Normal Animal: The polar bears of the Shadow Moon Monastery possess an unnatural degree of intelligence. They are able to understand sign language and serve as guides through the White for their human companions. Considered by the monks to be avatars of a mystical animal spirit, the bears are implicitly trusted as judges of character. Their approval is required before outsiders are considered worthy of learning the monastery's secrets.
- The Radio Dies First: Wesley smashes the two-way radio Wilkes had outfitted him with after deducing that there's a tracking beacon inside. This leaves him totally cut off from civilization.
- River of Insanity: All the crewmembers of the Indomitable — save Galen — perish in the attempt to locate the lost city. To be fair, this is because the Adamant attacked it an an attempt to claim the discovery for their benefactor Wilkes, but everyone on the Adamant died too.
- Running Gag: Solon Kai is incapable of pronouncing "Singleton," producing increasingly mangled attempts at Wesley and Galen's last name as the story progresses — like "Singlington" and "Singleson."
- Scrapbook Story: The prologue is formatted as an audio transcript of the attack on the Indomitable. Most of the remainder of the book is formatted as transcripts from Wesley, Galen, or Linea's personal journals.
- Sequel Hook: Galen and Wesley come to the conclusion that the city buried under the ice isn't a city at all but an engine that the Precursors used to open a wormhole to another planet, and the Arktos device is part of the compass they used to calibrate their trip.
- Steampunk: The story is set in a world operating at industrial-level technology, the main character is a pilot, his father is an adventurer, and Zeppelins abound.
- Title Drop: At the end of the prologue, Galen writes in his journal that he's lost "above the timberline."
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Wilkes kidnaps Wesley's mother about a third of the way through the book in order to ensure Wesley's cooperation in locating Galen and the buried city. Wesley sabotages his own radio in retaliation to prevent Wilkes from tracking him. When Wilkes shows up to confront Wesley and Galen at the end, no mention is made of Wesley's mother or what happened to her.
- When You Coming Home, Dad?: Galen's career as a Polaris Geographic Society explorer kept him away from home for long stretches of time, and he missed much of Wesley's childhood. Wesley is quite bitter towards his father over this (though he doesn't hesitate to throw himself headlong into a perilous, underfunded quest to rescue his father once there's an inkling that he survived the crash of the Indomitable). He does punch his father in the gut the moment they reunite in the lost city, but is perfectly happy to continue putting himself in danger to protect his father from Wilkes.
