Ice Flowers is the draft of a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel which forms the thesis part of a Master of Creative Writing project. It is accompanied by the exegesis Love in a Cold Climate, which frames the creative work within the speculative fiction genre and in terms of literary style and thematic explorations. The novel Ice Flowers has as its backdrop a combination of human-caused and natural catastrophes, with the physical setting of the work acting as a reflection of the main characters’ inner mental and emotional turmoil. It shifts between two narrative points of view, those of a young woman named Raina, who is the first-person narrator and her husband Toby, who narrates in the third person. The exegesis frames Ice Flowers in terms of the debates surrounding speculative fiction, specifically the argument that most authors who write under the genre are condemned to the “literary ghetto”, the traditions of post-apocalyptic fiction and how Ice Flowers dealt with some of its limitations and constraints, and the use of language to construct and deconstruct worlds and states of mind.