'Winter World' by A.G. Riddle
'Winter World' by A.G. Riddle

The good

  • Intriguing central premise: the world is starting to cool and freeze over at an extremely rapid pace, and no one knows why. Humanity is forced to move into the warmest parts of the planet and work together to unravel this mystery, which leads to interesting geopolitics.

  • To unravel the mystery, humanity also needs to assemble the ultimate team: the world’s most badass scientists, astronauts, soldiers, and other experts, with the protagonist, a super genius roboticist, as the lead. It’s fairly cliche, but for the most part, it’s still entertaining, and offers up plenty of competence porn.

  • The book is mostly focused on hard science, rather than magic, which I always appreciate.

  • As the mystery unravels, you get some fun twists and turns. Overall, it’s an entertaining read throughout.

The not so good

  • The idea of humanity joyfully bonding to save the world seems a bit laughable after the COVID pandemic. At this point, any global disaster book needs to include a contingent of humanity that’s rooting for the world to end, and doing everything they can to interfere with the people working to save it.

  • The characters are pretty weak. The main protagonist is too smart, making unreasonably large mental leaps, and developing absurd technologies. There’s a thin line between “competence porn” and “this is just the author advancing the plot in silly ways.” The other protagonist is an astronaut who starts off super interesting, but then quickly becomes a damsel in distress, and ends up being little more than the love interest for the main character. There are a few other characters in the story who start off interesting (e.g., the other members of the ultimate badass team), but the book abandons all of them pretty quickly.

  • Minor spoiler: I always cringe a bit when a book has an “explainer”—that is, a bad guy who goes on a long monologue to explain everything that has been happening. And doubly so when it’s an alien intelligence that can magically learn our language and communication systems just in time to deliver this monologue.

Rating: 3.5 stars