Winter World, by A.G. Riddle

ISBN: 9781789543223
Amazon ID: B07N32K12H

Part one of the Long Winter trilogy.

The narrative in this book starts out alternating chapters between two characters James and Emma, who are in very different places and doing very different things, but who fairly soon join together in a single storyline.

Unfortunately, the to-ing and fro-ing of the narrative between the two characters almost every chapter continues in the same way for the rest of the book, and this pretty soon gets quite irritating. It's not as bad as authors who can't work out whether the story is taking place in the past, present or future at any given point in time, but it's distinctly distracting in terms of trying to follow the plot and get involved with the characters, because almost every chapter jars you out of the mindset you were getting into, and back to someone else's thoughts and viewpoint.

If both these characters survive to the end of this book, I just hope they don't continue talking to the reader in alternate chapters for the remainder of the trilogy.

The timeline of the book is also very difficult to work out - some things happen much more quickly than is plausible; others clearly take "a considerable time" but there is no point of reference or indication of quite how much time is passing at key points in the story.

The basic premise of the book is that the Earth is getting colder, and both the timescale on which this occurs (to the extent that it does) and also the rate at which the decrease in temperature changes, are utterly implausible. Everything is far too fast for any sort of climatological accuracy.

At one point in the story a spacecraft powered by a nuclear reactor is having to conserve fuel (without having been in operation for centuries or millennia).

The crew of this spacecraft are designing and constructing "drones" (smaller spacecraft with undisclosed propulsion systems, although it's clear they're not nuclear) as they travel to their destination over a matter of mere weeks and months. The idea of having sufficient space, tools, raw materials and pre-fabricated "kit parts" to create literally hundreds of these things, whilst aboard a spacecraft which itself was hastily constructed and launched, requires the suspension of a little too much disbelief for my liking.

The story itself is sufficiently intriguing to keep the reader going (for me, at least), just to find out whether these people manage to achieve what they set out to do.

The author's biography states that he "spent ten years starting internet companies" (whatever an "internet company" is…) however it seems impossible to find out what these companies were, so the obvious conclusion is that they were not successful ones.

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