COLD PEOPLE

After aliens occupy Earth in 2023 and enact "the largest genocide ever committed," all human survivors are forced to live in Antarctica, where genetic engineering becomes key to their survival as a species.

The survivors are given 30 days to make it to the frigid continent. Children younger than 14 and adults older than 45 must be left behind. In Hope Town, a ramshackle settlement one group of immigrants creates, the arts are "as important to survival as housing and food." But in McMurdo City, where billionaires and Nobel Prize winners reside, science rules. The fruits of the research there include "ice-adapted" children including Echo, a 6-foot-6 female with blue blood, lizardlike skin, and fat cells derived from the octopus. Increasingly, tension grows between those who have embraced the DNA modifications as a way of protecting their children from the subzero cold and those who believe that only an entirely new breed of human is capable of surviving in it. "Invaded by aliens, we have created aliens of our own," declares an unhappy geneticist. Part Frankenstein and part Nineteen Eighty-Four, the latest novel by the author of Child 44 (2008) is nothing if not ambitious. But after getting off to a great start, in which a family overcomes grievous odds to make it to Antarctica by supertanker only to get caught in an offshore logjam and risk missing the aliens' deadline, the novel loses its heart and narrative sweep to stiffly written scenes and didactic commentaries. Smith has no interest in the aliens, who are never seen or heard. There's little character development—Echo could have been sketched in by a computer. And an ordinary character's physical attraction to her is awkward to the point of icky.

A dystopian novel that can be as cold as its setting.