White Continent
For thirty years, diehard David Poyer fans searched used bookstores for the few surviving tattered copies of WHITE CONTINENT. This sprawling first novel reads like a remix of ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE DOGS OF WAR, as retold by Robert Heinlein or Alistair Maclean. It follows a team of adventurers, mercenaries, outcasts, and entrepreneurs in a daring coup to take over the last undeveloped and unclaimed land on earth – the terrifyingly hostile continent of Antarctica. Using advanced technology to survive, they build a Utopian society, both communal and fiercely individualistic, unlike any that exists elsewhere on earth.
Jaded Parisian expat turned Antarctic pioneer Edouard Roudensky is the narrator, forced to drive his pencil over a damp legal pad at the point of a gun. But dozens of other sharply-drawn characters populate these pages too. International legal expert Fumiko Kasuhara; whaler and ice-captain Adrian Larsson; tight-fisted oil-sands billionaire Dorothea Lindahl; icy, sardonic mercenary Robert Blakeley. And many others, from all corners of the world, joined under their red, green, and white flag . . . who then, unexpectedly, find they must fight for their new country, against those who want to take it from them.
The geopolitical scene has changed, but the book is prescient in its foreshadowing of today’s conflicting claims and impending resource wars in places like the Arctic and the China Sea. Fans of Poyer’s later books will notice themes he’s still exploring, such as the search for authentic authority, conflicted heroes, and deeply-layered, multidimensional characters who think as well as act. The ambition and epic sweep of WHITE CONTINENT, as well as David Poyer’s evocation of the horrific grandeur of the most hostile setting on earth, marked the appearance of a blazing new talent. He would go on to craft nearly fifty exciting novels of action, adventure, history . . . always chronicling the struggles of heroic men and women to achieve, endure, and prevail.
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David Poyer
DAVID POYER was born in DuBois, Pennsylvania in 1949. He grew up in Brockway, Emlenton, and Bradford, and graduated from Bradford Area High School in 1967. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1971, and later received a master’s degree from George Washington University.
His active and reserve naval service included sea duty in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, and Pacific, and shore duty at the Pentagon, Fleet Training Center, Surface Warfare Development Group, Joint Forces Command, and in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. He retired from the Joint Forces Command as a captain, with the Defense Superior Service Medal as his highest award.
Poyer has taught or lectured at Annapolis, Flagler College, University of Pittsburgh, Old Dominion University, the Armed Forces Staff College, the University of North Florida, Christopher Newport University, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and other institutions. He has been a guest on PBS’s “Writer to Writer” series and on Voice of America, and has appeared at the Southern Festival of Books and many other literary events. He taught for sixteen years in the Maslow MA/MFA in Creative Writing faculty at Wilkes University. He’s currently a fellow at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts and teaches at the Ossabaw Island Writers’ Retreat. He lives on Virginia’s Eastern Shore with novelist Lenore Hart.
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