Author Smith has a terrific imagination and the new beings he comes up with are as fascinating as they are varied. Still, enough have made it there safely to begin a new life within the three towns and one small city constructed from the scavenged parts of the ships and planes that brought them. We jump 20 years and SOMEHOW they've managed to create human-animal hybrids that can withstand the cold. I was heavily invested in the characters from the beginning and it was just as interesting learning about their pasts, as it was their current journeys.

When I reached the end of the book I felt a little frustrated because I wanted to know what the aliens were doing with the rest of Earth. The 20-year gap in the storyline omitted facts about the struggles in the development of communities.I’m picky when choosing science fiction novels to read, I try to avoid scenarios I can’t simply envisage and for me this includes alien beings, particularly those with superpowers. It was interesting that the author chose to follow relatively ordinary people in his narrative rather than world leaders or more traditional hero type characters. Humans playing god and having it backfire is a classic staple of fiction and Tom Rob Smith’s version of that here is a promising setup of literary sci-fi - the execution though is very underwhelming.

For Tom Rob Smith, known for his series of historical Russian thrillers, which started with his break out debut Child 44, that novel is Cold People. It would be easy to pick a few holes in the narrative, but I found that I really enjoyed the story and found some of the science (there’s quite a bit here) and particularly the intrinsic moral debates really interesting and thought provoking. This is where the story for me got really interesting and also gripping as science becomes more involved in the fight to keep the human race alive.When I read the blurb I thought the premise was fascinating and I was intrigued to see how Tom Rob Smith envisaged this scenario playing out. This book begins with a couple of historical vignettes about Antarctica then moves to the present day in Lisbon where Liza and her family are on holiday. I have really enjoyed the previous novels I have read by Tom Rob Smith, so was keen to try his stand-alone, ‘Cold People. Breadth has clearly been prioritised over depth in this book, and the richness of the character’s experience in this strange new world has been lost as a result.

The goal was to develop powerful beings that could withstand the cold and perform jobs that humans could not do in extreme climate.It’s so descriptive that rarely have I read a book where I’ve felt I am living side by side with the characters. but no… pretty soon the readers starts wondering about the development of the story, which decides for catchy screen figures and is clearly written for the adaptation for a series on one of the streaming portals. Part Frankenstein and part Nineteen Eighty-Four, the latest novel by the author of Child 44 (2008) is nothing if not ambitious. The book starts off well with a truncated history of what humans have done on the continent of Antarctica, the most hostile region on the planet for humans to live.