The fate of Sir John Franklin's Northwest Passage expedition was as bleak and featureless as the territory it was sent to survey.

	"THE TERROR" By Dan Simmons Little, Brown ($25.99)

Franklin's ships, Erebus and Terror, were designed with the best technology of their day -- steel-reinforced hulls, retractable iron rudders and steam-powered propellers.

Their holds contained three years' worth of provisions, much of it preserved in tin cans -- the latest in food preservation technology.

Erebus and Terror were last seen in July 1845 off Greenland. Nine years and many rescue attempts later, Scottish explorer John Rae purchased some of the expedition's silverware from an Inuit who said a party of 35 or 40 white men had starved to death near the mouth of the Back River, in a region of the Arctic Ocean studded with barren islands separated by ice-choked passages.

Subsequent expeditions found traces of Franklin's party, including human remains and a message dated April 25, 1848. The remains suggested that some of Franklin's men might have resorted to cannibalism. The message reported that Franklin died June 11, 1847.

What happened to Franklin and his 129 men is a frustrating mystery to historians, but a boon for Dan Simmons, whose new novel imagines what might have befallen the expedition.

In his version, the explorers find themselves not just frozen into relentless Arctic sea ice, their ships being slowly squeezed to splinters, but hunted by a gigantic beast that often appears to materialize out of ice and snow itself. Its exact nature is as difficult to discern as the featureless landscape, shrouded in fog, swirling blizzards and darkness that descends for months on end.

As weeks in the ice become months and then years, the crew slowly succumbs to scurvy and food poisoning because of the poor quality of their canned supplies.

Francis Crozier, the Irish officer who takes command after Franklin's death, must decide whether to stay with the disintegrating ships or make a desperate escape on foot over the ice.

In the cold, the dark, with their hopes of escape or rescue inexorably diminishing, the members of the expedition gradually shed the trappings of the rigid Victorian society that put them on the ice in the first place, wreaking savagery on one another that far surpasses anything even the beast on the ice can dish out.

"The Terror" can get Melvillean in spots, bogging down in descriptions of Arctic geography and nautical protocol. And Simmons, a veteran of the horror genre, may indulge in one or two vicious beast attacks too many.

But ultimately, this novel makes some keen observations about man and nature, civilization and savagery. Over the course of the narrative it becomes clear that the global might of the British Empire meant nothing in the Arctic.