I met this book at Walla Walla’s Book & Game Company while I was shopping for my niece’s birthday present. They had a meagre selection of SciFi but this one caught my eye for me not her because it was takes place in Antarctica.¹ I noted the title for download onto my phone (since I’m traveling and don’t want to carry books home) and headed off to Earthlight Used Books down the street, where I felt right at home from the moment I walked in the front door, and scored a hardcover collection of Heinlein for my niece.²

Cold People starts with a love story – love at first sight on a hot summer afternoon in Lisbon, Portugal. Liza, one of the main characters, falls for a handsome young tourist boat captain, a sort of Portuguese version of a Venetian gondolier, working his line, the guide hired by her parents warns her, on all the young beautiful American girls. She doesn’t much care, having played it safe all her life, and goes for a sunset sail with him, expecting him to put the moves on her, and offended when he doesn’t because, for him, this is true love.³ They return to the docks to find that the streets have emptied. Everyone is inside, glued to the TV, where the alien ships who have just filled the sky have broadcast a message. No matter what language you speak, the message is in your language, even if the person standing beside you watching the same broadcast is hearing it in their language instead.⁴

The message is simple: if you want to live, you must move to Antarctica within 30 days.⁵

People begin scrambling. Chaos ensues. People who can’t handle the idea of aliens jump out of windows or just sit and refuse to get up and move. The girl collects her parents and sister, they meet up with her boat captain, and he helps them get spots on his father’s fishing boat, along with his family. The overcrowded boat makes its way south. When it becomes clear that their tiny ship will never make it all the way – so many ships will never make it – Liza and her now-boyfriend and her sister and his brother make it to another boat – a repurposed hijacked oil tanker – but it is not taking anyone over a certain age and their parents and his brothers stay behind. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll find you somehow.”

The mad scramble to the South Pole, and the screening methods that different countries use to determine who will be able to leverage the limited transport is the most realistic thing about this book, to me. Most countries prioritize scientists and experts who can help them survive in Antarctica and form a new civilization. Some prioritize those in power: top politicians, royalty, and the wealthy. Some, like the oil tanker mentioned above, do their best to rescue as many of “the people” as possible but still impose restrictions to ensure that the chosen people are most likely to survive: no one under a certain age, no one over a certain age, no one with health conditions.

The mad scramble ends in an LA-worthy traffic jam near the Lemaire Channel. Antarctica is roughly shaped like a fist with the thumb sticking up towards the tip of South America. That thumb is where the flotilla lands, just in time. The aliens, true to their word, evaporate every human⁶ who does not have feet firmly planted on the Antarctic shore, leaving behind empty ships, empty submarines, and traumatized survivors.

And this is where, to me, this book leaves plausible speculation. The people survive. They survive the cold, the weather, they find food, make shelter, and survive. The book skips forward 20 years, with people looking back at the challenges they faced, surviving without gear, without winter clothing, without insulated and heated housing, many people died. They still prioritize medical treatment to people who are likely to survive and not be a drain on the community. But they’ve created a close-knit, community-oriented civilization, a libertarian democracy. They survive by eating food they catch just offshore and Penguin eggs, seal blubber, lichens, krill.

And this, to me, is completely unbelievable. The environment there is so fragile that, if they were eating as much as Smith says they are, they would wipe out the fauna immediately. And the lichens aren’t on Antarctica proper where anyone can find and dehydrate them, turning them into a sort of south-pole marijuana,⁷ they are hundreds of miles away on islands to the North, with a few perhaps deep in the desert valleys far to the south of where these people have settled. There are not enough of the long-legged crabs and fish that Smith describes them eating, to survive the onslaught of human predation. The refugees eat penguin eggs and albatross and seals – and krill, which is in short-supply nowadays, as any Humpback whale who has been there will tell you, if you stop to listen to their songs.

There are three colonies on the peninsula. And there is another at McMurdo station. That one is a conglomeration of the highest-level scientists and politicians⁸ and military leaders, with a few loyal citizens to support them. McMurdo is led by a Chinese scientist, one of an underground scientific community who, prior to the aliens’ arrival, had secretly rebelled against the U.N. convention regarding CRSPR and genetic experimentation on humans. Left, in my mind, slightly mad by the loss of her family, her children, her future, she gathers the top scientists together and gives them a choice: they are going to split into two teams. One team will work incrementally, nudging human genes to try to give future generations an advantage in the inhospitable Antarctic climate. The other team – her team – will go balls-to-the-wall forward, in a fail-fast mentality, mixing advantageous genes from a variety of animals⁹, in an effort to throw things at the wall and see what sticks, to accelerate the replacement of humans with something that at least contains some semblance of our genes, as quickly as possible.

To carry these babies to term, they demand volunteers from the three peninsular communities, women who desperately want babies and have been unable to carry to term any other ways. Liza volunteers to carry a child and raise it as her own, which she does, although it almost kills her. Her child is different, better able to survive – and, in fact, prefer – the cold, inhospitable climate, so different that she almost isn’t human, although she still feels kinship with her surrogate parents. Liza is the last mother to return with a baby. Although McMurdo continues to demand prospective mothers, those women do not return. No explanation is given. They accepted the risk.

And there is something else going on.

I’m not going to spoil it for you. Because, despite my skepticism about the impact of human colonies on the Antarctic climate and the ability for such unprepared humans to even survive the weather, this is a compelling story. I started reading it when I went to bed around nine, intending to read a chapter or two and go to sleep and found myself, at midnight, at 2 am, still reading¹⁰, until I finally finished around the time my husband, who is staying on NY time so he can work remotely, got up and started preparing to boot up.

“Have you been awake all night?” He asked sternly.

“Well, not really, on and off,” I prevaricated. “This stupid book really caught me.”

And I proceeded to summarize the entire plot while he got dressed and logged in.

I don’t know that I will read it again. It’s like that movie Whiteout, which is set in Antarctica but could have taken place anywhere cold.¹¹ And I didn’t like the world he created well enough to want to visit it again. But it was worth it to see Antarctica and fantasize about living and working there.

Which I know is a fantasy.¹²

But it’s a nice fantasy.

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1. A reason for me to like it. Nothing to do with niece liking it. ↩︎
2. So many “i’s before e’s” in that paragraph. Brrrrr. ↩︎
3. For her, too, which is why she is so offended. ↩︎
4. It is also broadcasting on every screen everywhere, even in North Korea, even if the device isn’t plugged in, even if the North Korean secret police heard you listening and smashed your TV screen screaming it was all an American trick, it’s still playing. Now that’s an emergency warning you can’t ignore. ↩︎
5. I think Smith is making a comment about Indigenous peoples who were banished to reservations around the world. It’s a little muddy, but he keeps referring to Antarctica as a “reservation” so I can assume that’s what he’s doing here. ↩︎
6. Animals are fine. ↩︎
7. If you abuse this drug, and get into medical trouble, you are not prioritized and will die. Your choice. ↩︎
8. The elite hangout is a bar called the Ex-President’s Club because it’s staffed with former political leaders who have no other skills to offer the community than mixing drinks, telling compelling stories, and listening. Classic. ↩︎
9. That she and other top-level officials brought with them. ↩︎
10. Augh! Another 250 pages to go! Another 100 pages to go! ↩︎
11. I recommend instead The Thing or, if you prefer mysteries to horror, The Head. I’m not even going to mention that stupid X-Files movie with the spaceship – the episode of House that takes place at Antarctica is so much better. Or – ooh, what’s this? One I haven’t seen? And it takes place in a lighthouse! With monsters who look like they just crawled out of The Descent! Going to have to find a way to watch that one. ↩︎
12. I would not make the cut by any of Smith’s criteria. ↩︎