"Gallagher's Glacier" is a 1970 science-fiction novel by Walt and Leigh Richmond, published as one half of an Ace Double, with the other half being a short story collection called "Positive Charge", also by Walt and Leigh Richmond. I had previously read The Lost Millenium, an alternative history story. This, however, was a more standard space opera story.
The story starts, as many of these stories start, by giving us a short history of galactic exploration. After a brief period of colonization by individual explorers, big corporations dominate the galaxy. The narrator, Harald Dundee, is a captain for a shipping corporation, but he meets someone on the outside of the system---the titular Gallagher, and his glacier, a spaceship made out of a comet, with engines and chambers placed in a gigantic chunk of ice. And this science-fiction novel is an "explainer", where the technical feasibility of various technologies, as well as social systems, is discussed at length. Like many science-fiction readers, I am both interested in their concepts, and charmed by their enthusiasm, but also feel that the story gets interrupted so that they can explain. And the story continues: years after first meeting Gallagher, Dundee meets him again, on a dystopian, company-controlled mining planet. When Dundee's conscience can't let him ignore the oppression of the minor, the company imprisons him, leading to a jail break by Gallagher and company. (This is also described in some detail). The climax of the book, such as it is, describes how the escaped miners, led by Gallagher, use some type of solar electrical generator to turn the tides against the corporations. This came as somewhat of a deus ex machina, and the 100 page book was tied up very quickly.
This book had some things going for it, including novel scientific ideas and a well-paced adventure story. The biggest downside was the emphasis on explaining scientific concepts, especially since (like "The Lost Millennium") it seems the authors are using this as a way to advocate a real belief in unorthodox scienctific theories about solar-electric power.