Old God's Time: A Novel (2023) by Sebastian Barry

Audiobook Review

Old God's Time: A Novel (2023)

by Sebastian Barry

 Sebastian Barry is an Irish novelist and playwright known better on the other side of the Atlantic even though many of this books have been set in the New World.  That's how I discovered him, reading his novel from 2016, Days Without End which is about a gay relationship in 19th century frontier America.  The writing was sharp and the characters well observed.  I remember the reading experience fondly. In 2020 I also read the follow-up, A Thousand Moons, which carried forward the story of the same family, this time focusing mostly on their adopted daughter.   What I did not do is go back and read his back catalog, which features eight older novels one of which was a  Costa Prize winner.  Barry is also a perennial on the Booker Prize longlist, but without a win. 

  Barry's latest book, Old God's Time: A Novel, takes us back to Ireland.  Tom Kettle is a retired policeman, decamped to the Irish coast, determined to live out his retirement in a faux-castle.  He is a widower, and his children are city people, with a son in America. His quietude is disturbed when he is visited by two young policemen asking questions about the unsolved murder of a child molesting priest several decades ago.

  Unraveling the past is the concern of Old God's Time and while it takes the form of a detective novel, the contents are straight literary fiction- no tired genre tropes here.   There can be no description of plot points in a review of a book like this because it will spoil the reading/listening experience.

Cold People (2023) by Tom Rob Smith

Audiobook Review

Cold People (2023)

by Tom Rob Smith

   The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Liu Cixin is about as big as you can get in the world of science fiction of fantasy, each of the three volumes won multiple awards in the English speaking science fiction world and Amazon bought the rights for over one billion dollars.  Those books chronicle the long-term demise/survival of the human race at the hands of a cruel and unyielding universe.  I am, of course, a huge fan.

  I'm mentioning this because Cold People, the latest book from strangely named author Tom Rob Smith, reminded me of something cooked up after the author had actually read the Earth's Past trilogy because this book strongly resembles an episode in that trilogy.  Specifically, in the trilogy, the aliens finally arrive on Earth and they order all of humanity to relocate to Australia within a year and refusal to comply will be a death sentence.   This is just one episode an a trilogy that spans millions of years of human time, but it strongly resembles the set up for this book:  Aliens arrive and give all of humanity 30 days to reach Antarctica.  

  There are, of course, significant difference starting with the location of the removal: Antarctica vs Australia.   Also, in the Earth's Past books, the aliens are characters in the books, we know about them and their back story.  In Cold People, there is no contact with the aliens and the removal is often referred to as an intergalactic eviction of humanity for failure to properly care for the planet.

  Smith tells his story in the familiar style of the international thriller- making this book interesting in the sense that is a straight science fiction book TOLD AS an international thriller- Smith shifts between continents and back and forward in time to bring this cast of characters together in Antarctica before the plot is set in motion, namely that the best and brightest of what remains of world science has decided that the only future for humanity is the extreme manipulation of the human genome.

     Like the Earth's Past books, Smith grapples with the question of how much humans can change before they cease to be human, both in terms of the concrete examples of genetically modified creatures with human dna and in terms of the decisions made by humans to obtain those results.  As an expansion of the ideas and themes of the human removal chapters of Earth's Past, Cold People represents an interesting take.  As a stand alone thriller/sci fi I was left with many questions, specifically, about why humanity's best and brightest would jump straight to making "para-humans" and more without trying to modify the genomes of "ordinary humans" first- to be more resistant to cold, for example.

   Anyway, for anyone interested in the subject, Cold People is interesting but it doesn't strike me as an international best seller because it is so unremittingly dark.