I’m always pleased to add a book to my Antarctica shelf. And this is not just a thriller, but a dystopian SF tale. If you read one of 2022’s big dystopian releases, PROJECT HAIL MARY, and could not get enough of a doomed Earth getting colder, COLD PEOPLE by Tom Rob Smith is just what you need. But it won’t leave you more cheerful, unlike the Andy Weir book.

Liza, an American student with her family in Portugal takes a fancy to Atto, a young local fisherman and tour guide. But their budding romance is interrupted by an alien fleet descending to fill the skies around the world. There are various people who are cold, and the aliens are the coldest, broadcasting messages that the planet’s population has thirty days to get to Antarctica. Chaos ensues. Liza and Atto are caught up in the maelstrom, doing their best to save their families and as many other people as possible.  

I notice that nobody thinks about animals--pets, domestic stock, or wildlife. Nobody knows what the aliens intend, except probably colonisation, shunting the awkward primitive people off to a barren waste reservation. This number of people can’t survive on the cold continent, even the numbers who can make it there in time. But for sure, a medical student and a fisherman are going to be useful.   

A key part of this novel is reorganising society to focus on who and what we would value in such a changed world. Two-thirds of the story is set twenty years after the start, with Liza and Atto followed for continuity and understanding. During the later account, more characters are introduced, with flashbacks to their lives before the fall, including an Israeli soldier and a Chinese genetic scientist. The world they are building is one that tries to preserve humanity, but not as we know it, in a future that will never look like the past again. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I feel that the changes wrought by these breakthroughs are too extreme, but then, we have an alien invasion.

Author Tom Rob Smith leaves us in no doubt of his message. At the very start, he shows us early seafarers discovering and then exploiting Antarctic shore life. If it moved it was killed and eaten or sold. Why should explorers discovering Earth behave with any greater warmth? COLD PEOPLE is an extraordinary vision, a reflection, and a warning. We exploit nature at our peril. Suspense is always present, but the story is highly readable, if chilling.