Cold People by Tom Rob Smith

Published by Scribner on February 7, 2023

Cold People might best be regarded as a fantasy, or maybe as a thought experiment. Its implausible plot rules out caregorization as science fiction. Regardless of how the novel might be classified, the story it tells is far from engaging.

Alien invaders fill the skies with their ships while broadcasting an ultimatum to humans: move to Antarctica within 30 days or die. Personally, I’d break into one of the homes abandoned by rich people and spend my last 30 days sampling their wine cellars, but I have a serious aversion to cold weather. The survivors in Cold People have a serious aversion to being disintegrated.

The aliens have disabled the world’s most destructive weapons, leaving nations powerless to resist an alien occupation. Having rendered humans helpless to resist, why not disintegrate them all instead of disintegrating everyone who fails to make it to Antarctica? It’s not like the aliens are doing humans a favor by turning the least hospitable continent into a reservation. The question is never answered. Sadly, I found the many unswered questions to be more pressing than those the novel addresses.

The politics of self-interest during the invasion might be the most interesting part of the novel. One fellow converts an oil tanker into a ferry and takes as many passengers as he can, provided they aren’t too young or too old to work for the group’s survival. Israel uses its military to occupy its airports, commandeers all civilian aircraft regardless of the nations from which the planes originated, kicks all non-Israelis out of the airport, and uses the stolen aircraft exclusively to transport Israelis to Antarctica.

Some nations use the thirty days to fight against each other, hoping to secure a national foothold in Antarctica by wiping out competing nations. The wars don’t amount to much in the absence of missiles and bombs.

It turns out that people need to pull together to survive in Antarctica and that religious, ethnic, and national differences are no longer of consequeence. At Hope Town, settlers have put aside differences and embraced everyone in their diverse communities. But the novel isn’t really a kumbaya celebration of humanity coming together, because people soon understand that no amount of cooperation will keep them alive after they drink all the brandy and when the survival gear they brought with them wears out.

We are told little about how humans survive at all. Nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers still have power, but they can’t house a million people. Catching enough fish and seals to feed a million people seems like a daunting task, but establishing microbreweries just seems like a misuse of scarce resources.

Maybe I could have lived with the absence of necessary detail if the story had not moved well beyond implausibility. A geneticist who was carrying out forbidden experiments in China decides the human survival requires newborns to be genetically engineered to withstand cold weather. Within a generation, the engineering has produced two versions of ice-adapted parahumans. Children like Echo are born in the usual way and live a relatively normal life apart from having scales and preferring the cold to a warm environment.

The other parahumans, torn from wombs after a brief gestation and then imprisoned in caves, represent a more extreme version of adapted humanity. They are freakishly strong and smart. One of them, Eitan, can make himself transparent to blend in with ice. Oh, and did I mention the snow gorillas with bright orange eyes? Is it remotely conceivable that a geneticist can achieve these results, even using military supercomputers on aircraft carriers, in a generation or two? Tom Rob Smith didn’t convince me.

The point of the novel seems to be that humans are willing to create creatures who aren’t actually human to perpetuate some version of humanity. How snow gorillas advance that cause baffles me. Why it never occurs to anyone that tinkering with genetics to create monsters might be a bad idea is even more difficult to understand.

Echo is the only parahuman we meet who isn’t a monster. Her adaptation is supposedly less extreme, but she learns that she can control temperature — for example, by freezing a gun that someone points at her. How is this a conceivable genetic adaptation? Don’t ask because you won’t get an explanation. Just as implausible is the telepathy with which the parahumans are endowed. Oh, did I mention they can alter the chemistry of ice? I’m surprised they don’t have x-ray vision or the ability to fly. The novel might make a good comic book or Marvel movie but it makes little sense as a work of literature.

So does the novel have any actual humans a reader might care about? Some chapters focus on an Israeli soldier named Yotam Penzak. He expects to be left behind in Israel because he is not among the smartest or most politically connected. He’s chosen because he is a witness to a failed Russian strike at the airport and will presumably defend the Israeli settlement on Antarctica with vigor. In the absence of nationalized settlements, Yotam is instead tasked with assisting the Chinese geneticist despite having no background in science. Yotam was apparently chosen for his job because he was capable of loving without regard to individual differences. Yotam ends up falling in love with and becoming an advocate for an extreme parahuman.

The novel also focuses on an American woman named Liza and her Italian lover Atto. They fell in love in Italy when Atto invited Liza on a boat tour. Atto was so enamored with Liza that he didn’t try to shag her, which only angered Liza by depriving her of vacation sex with a hot Italian. Simplistic themes borrowed from romance fiction being what they are, Atto and Liza end up together on Antarctica, where they conceive Echo. A normal human boy named Tetu overlooks Echo’s scales and falls in love with her. I guess there aren’t many women to choose from after most of humanity is wiped out.

Perhaps Yotam and Atto fall for parahumans as a metaphor for relationships that are not cisgendered. To make sure no reader misses the point, a character asks, “Why does love have to be just one thing?” Fair enough. If a normal human and a parahuman want to love each other, why is that anyone else’s business? My problem is not with the theme but with the absurdity of ice-adapted parahumans who develop superpowers.

We also meet Kasim Abbas, an Iraqi who is now charged with transporting ice-adapted kids to McMurdo Station where the most extreme parahumans are developed, leaving their parents behind. And we meet Jinju, who escaped from a dictatorship in China. These characters are reminders of humans who live in varying states of subjugation, designed to make the reader think about the morality of creating parahumans and immediately imprisoning them. The more salient question might involve the morality of creating parahumans at all.

I suppose the novel might prompt book club discussions of the morality underlying the creation and enslavement of parahumans, although I doubt that many book clubs will take an interest in a story that makes no sense. If humans are going to die out because they can’t adapt to life in Antarcica, is it better for some monstrous version of humans to endure even if parahumans resemble a mixture of telepathic fish and the Incredible Hulk? I’m not sure the question is worth pondering.

While Cold People could be read as a story about the need to embrace diversity and reject the horrors of subjugation, the ultimate themes are “love conquers all” (although it didn’t conquer the aliens) and “humans aren’t so bad” (an ahistorical view that seems to be contradicted by the creation and subjugation of genetically altered servants). Near the end, a character says “the only way to survive on this continent is to find someone to love.” I guess snuggling might slow the length of time it takes to freeze to death, but learning how to fish and building shelters would be a better survival strategy.

I was particularly inspired (to laugh) by the deep conversation that Echo has with Tetu about what it feels like to be in love, a question posed in the midst of an inevitable battle between humans and parahumans. It’s always good to pause and discuss the philosophy of love while what little is left of humankind is under attack.

I enjoyed Child 44 and its progeny, in part because Smith created a strong atmosphere of realism in an unlikely story. His utter abandonment of reality in Cold People is disappointing.

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