[Since I haven't read this - for plot summary here is a review from Magazine of F&SF June 1957]:
Novelistically, The Frozen Year is James Blish's most successful to date - so successful, indeed, that one wonders as to its precise category. The author himself classes his 5 other novels as SF, but this one as a "contemporary novel." "Contemporary" is minutely imprecise, since the action takes place in 1958 and is related from the viewpoint of the 1960's; but whether any of the adventurous events have the beyond-contemporary-possiblity quality demonstrated by SF is a question left deliberately unresolved. Unarguably, this is a fiction of science, if possibly not science fiction; and Blish shows his expected skill in detailed research and in integration of scientific thought with story. As part of the International Geophysical Year an expedition sets out for the North Pole, hopeful (among other objectives) of finding meteoritic evidence that the asteroids were once a single life-bearing planet. The scientific and technical problems of the expedition are absorbingly worked out; and its human tensions afford Blish an opportunity to examine a little of everything, from sexual fidelity to science-writing. If the results of examination are often less meaningful than the author hopes, the book is unflaggingly stimulating in its welcome effort to broaden the horizons of our field by - the closest I can come to a classification - trying to write a perfectly straight novel on a theme related to SF. [-Anthony Boucher]

There was a 200 or 300 copy hardcover from Ballantine (simultaneous), and also a British edition in 1957, titled Fallen Star.