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Cold People was a huge disappointment. The basic premise is that aliens have taken Planet Earth and sent humankind to exile in Antarctica. People have thirty days to get to Antarctica or face the consequences. Knowing that man cannot survive in that climate, the new community decides to embark on a program of genetic engineering to create people who can thrive in the ice – Cold People. The novel is an exercise in world building. Tom Rob Smith imagines the evacuation and the panic that would ensure when it became clear that only a small number of people would be able to reach Antarctica in time. He tries to imagine the setting up of a new community with new rules, overcoming the logistical issues of life in the ice. The trouble is, the world is not credible. Apparently the new world comprises four settlements with a total population of several million. They live on lichen they scrape from rocks. They never squabble. They are all on chatting terms with the new President, who imparts news by inviting the population to gather round. They set up homes and laboratories using spare parts cannibalised from the ships and planes on which they travelled. Former kings and presidents happily reminisce while working as bar tenders at the only pub in town. The scale just doesn’t work. People don’t act like real people. In twenty years on the ice, nobody has become depressed? Nobody ever misses the things they used to have? Nobody ever complains? People die and nobody seems to be upset? There are silly and impossible things – the aliens lift and deposit various world landmarks to Antarctica for no apparent reason. All the planes in the world land in darkness and most park up on an ice shelf with no difficulty. The world’s navies all land up in the same harbour at the same time (and then all sink within an hour of each other). There is a very slow moving plot that introduces us to the family that will save mankind (let’s call them the Skywalkers) and to the bad clan that want to damn mankind (the Empire). OK, so that was a different story, but this one is just as simplistic and the characters just as thin. But unlike Star Wars, Cold People has no ending – it just sets things up for a sequel or three. Oh, and the pacing is terrible. It keeps chopping to a backstory every time a new character is introduced – and those new characters seem to keep coming pretty much up until the end – which, of course, isn’t the end. I don’t like to be scathing about a novel, but Tom Rob Smith has a Booker longlisting under his belt: we know he can do better than this. **