Lay away book special: Looking for the hand that spins the wheel

The Wheel of Ice was maybe a script before it was a novel. That's the sense that I get from an oddity of the book's organization. Every time there's a flashback, it isn't presented as the stuff of a regular chapter, or even given space as its own. Instead they're delivered in multi-sectioned interludes.

These parts of the book let the flashbacks breathe, greatly benefiting the characters within them. But otherwise, unless there's some sort of editorial business at work here, I don't see why they need to be separate from the rest of the story.

Granted, separating them out like this does make them into more than just an embedded reminiscence. I'm not sure that seeing Phee's maternal ancestry as they passed the amulet down to her would have had quite the same impact if we were constantly reminded that she and Jamie were huddled in a shelter on Encephalaus with the rest of those gone skiing.

Speaking of which, the character of Jo, Phee's mom, reminds me of Lucca's mom from Chrono Trigger. They didn't come to be confined to wheelchairs for the same reasons, but it's perfectly within reason to say that Jo's character is a soldier version of Lara's.

Pushing the Chrono Trigger connection further, the amulet that Phee always has with her is now implicated as an object that has travelled through time. Could Stephen Baxter have played the RPG classic and taken a lead from Marle's pendant?

Alternatively, the amulet's origin in a "fossil" could be a nod to the Fourth Doctor story The Hand of Fear.

In this serial, Sarah Jane Smith becomes hypnotized by a ring on the fossilized hand of the Kastrian criminal Eldrad, and brings about his resurrection. The ring is found in 1970s Earth, and though it's been dormant for millions of years rather than having travelled through time, the same sort of idea is at work: A piece of ancient alien technology is on Earth, is discovered by someone and one way or another its true purpose is fulfilled. That's just what seems to be happening with Phee's amulet and the strange blue ceramic-y beings the miners of the Wheel are starting to encounter.

If this pattern is being followed, then all that's left is the why. Given the book's tagline of "Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration. Whatever the cost." and the prologue about the intelligence responsible for these things, the why looks like it'll be because that intelligence failed. Shifting the question to the how.