The Ice People () is a 1968 French science fiction novel by René Barjavel. Plot When a French expedition in Antarctica reveals the ruins of a 900,000-year-old civilization, scientists from all over the world flock to the site to help explore and understand. The entire planet watches via global satellite television, mesmerized, as the explorers uncover a chamber in which a man and a woman have been in suspended animation since, as the French title suggests, "the night of time". The woman, Eléa, is awakened, and through a translating machine she tells the story of her world, herself and her man Païkan, and how war destroyed her civilization. She also hints at an incredibly advanced knowledge that her still-dormant companion possesses. The man she says was frozen with her, a scientist, Coban, was the main source of interpretation of this knowledge, knowledge that could give energy and food to all humans at no cost. She hates him for having separated her from her lover Païkan. The superpowers of the world are not ready to let Eléa's secrets spread, and show that, 900,000 years and an apocalypse later, mankind has not grown up and is ready to make the same mistakes again. Thus, the international team of scientists works under the constant fear of sabotage, a fear that eventually is fulfilled when one of the scientists kills one of his comrades and commits suicide. The scientists then decide to wake up the man, Coban, who could personally deliver the knowledge they seek. He would require a blood transfusion, but Eléa, the only living donor for his blood type, poisons herself to kill the man she hates and then die. She had, however, been replaying her actual memories of her last days prior to the freeze, to the scientists, and she was not aware that just as she was put under anesthesia for the freeze process, her mind was recording events around her that she was not conscious of, and at the last minute, her lover had confronted the scientist Coban, killed him, and taken his place. The man she had just poisoned with her dying blood was in fact her lover, for she had not seen the body for the whole of the book, and no one could have known the body was his. She dies before the scientists could tell her her tragic mistake, at the same moment her lover