Cold People by Tom Rob Smith

From the brilliant, bestselling author of Child 44 comes a suspenseful and fast-paced novel about an Antarctic colony of global apocalypse survivors seeking to reinvent civilization under the most extreme conditions imaginable. The world has fallen. Without warning, a mysterious and omnipotent force has claimed the planet for their own. There are no negotiations, no demands, no reasons given for their actions. All they have is a message: humanity has thirty days to reach the one place on Earth where they will be allowed to exist…Antarctica. Cold People follows the perilous journeys of a handful of those who endure the frantic exodus to the most extreme environment on the planet. But their goal is not merely to survive the present. Because as they cling to life on the ice, the remnants of their past swept away, they must also confront the urgent challenge: can they change and evolve rapidly enough to ensure humanity’s future? Can they build a new society in the sub-zero cold? Original and imaginative, as profoundly intimate as it is grand in scope, Cold People is a masterful and unforgettable epic.

I like sci-fi, I like Antarctic survival books, but these two ideas combined at this author’s hand just never really seemed to gel properly together. I had no clear idea at the end why the beginning was required, which is surprising because evidently this author’s known for his thrillers? I expected something a bit more coherent and thrilling than what I got.

Mysterious aliens arrive in mysterious ships with a mysterious deadline – mankind has 30 days to evacuate to Antarctica. As you might expect, there’s a bit of a scramble to get there, obviously not everyone gets there, but the story follows two people brought together during this adversity who remain together once they get to their destination. Suddenly we’re 20 years later (hand waving how everyone survived that first winter on the ice with basically nothing in terms of supplies in the process), there’s four main colonies in Antarctica, and mysterious happenings going on at one of them (McMurdo City, built around the real life McMurdo Station). The book takes a shift in tone here, and we go back and forth in time perspective to meet new people thrown at us in the story, how they got here, and what their motivations are. The unraveling of the mystery at McMurdo City is the crux of the last half of the book, and what it means for the survivors in Antarctica.

I thought the pacing was a little off, for one. That first 20 year hand wave in the beginning was my biggest annoyance (how did everyone survive? Where did the food come from? How did they build shelters?), but wasn’t my only one. We meet characters periodically throughout the story that the author feels compelled to go back in time to tell their story, which takes you out of the flow of the larger event going on. We’re doing this almost all the way until the end, which is a little frustrating, especially for a character that then isn’t really used much.

I’m also annoyed that the aliens, the driving force for the entire first part of the book and the reason everyone is in Antarctica, were never mentioned again. What did they want? Why have everyone move to Antarctica? What happened to the rest of the planet? All these questions and more, left on the table. They were a plot mechanic to get the actors to their places on stage, and then forgotten about.

Finally, I’m also somewhat annoyed at the ideas brought up in the last half of the book. Spoilers here: Why did we feel compelled to take such drastic genetic manipulation steps for a population that seemed to be doing well? People were living, having children, building communities. Other than, y’know, it being super cold out (which they seemed to have well in hand using what they have anyway), everyone seemed fairly positive about the whole thing. Why not redirect that genetic manipulation energy to, I don’t know, crops or fish or something? Why did we leap immediately to creating, essentially, ice-adapted aliens and then act all shocked when they don’t think much of us?

It’s a very surface level book, so it’s fun only if you don’t start thinking too closely about any one element. The omissions and inconsistencies sucked a large part of the fun out for me, but maybe someone else will think more of it.

Having read the Child 44 Trilogy, this wasn't quite what I expected from Tom Rob Smith... which made it an even more entertaining read.

The plot sucks you in right away and never lets up. The primary characters are well-developed and relatable. Smith does a nice job of depicting a new society that has come to understand it can only survive by embracing its humanity and humanity's best qualities. Unfortunately, there are some holdouts from the old world that believe they alone know what's best for humankind, and having been left unchecked for too long, they may bring about its extinction.

My only negative feedback is that I was hoping the story would wrap up nicely at the end of the book rather than being met with an open end that makes this look like it may be the first book in a series.

Thank you Netgalley and Scribner for the opportunity to review this advanced copy of the book.

If you like character driven stories rather than plot driven, you might enjoy this book. Maybe. I didn't feel like the characters had much depth to them at all, and there wasn't really much of an arc for any of them... so maybe not.
If you're more into plot driven stories, you're definitely likely to have problems with this story and it's complete and utter lack of any feeling of closure.