Icerigger

Some people, SF purists, tend to curl the lip a bit at Alan Dean Foster because he does lots of novelisations of films and pulpy stuff, but I have always found his books, no matter how slight, are just good relaxing fun, perfect lighter reads. He has a smooth flowing style, glints of humour and engaging characters, and the pace is light speed rip roaring adventure. In Icerigger a salesman, Ethan Fortune, a huge Viking like crewman and a small geeky schoolteacher are inadvertantly swept up by kidnappers as they stumble into the abduction of a billionaire and his daughter, and are dragged away in a space shuttle. It then crashes on an icy planet, which is a balmy 0 degrees Fahrenheit at the equator in summer. There is a human outpost at the opposite side of the planet. The local city-state is about to be engulfed by a Horde of barbarians,so in return for the humans' help, (with a judicious amount of gunpowder, the use of crossbows and other minor infringements of the Prime Directive), the locals build them a ship with duralloy sort of skis for their icrigger, and off they go across the world, with various adventures, including an erupting volcano, religious fanatics who want to sacrifice them as blasphemers, a return engagement with the Horde,and attacks by vast creatures that would make a earthly whale look like a tiddler. Huge fun, a nostalgic re-read and of course I must now reread the rest of the trilogy.