Customer Reviews

Snow (GollanczF.)

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The Snow (2004) is an apocalyptic sci-fi novel by the ever-philosophical Adam Roberts.

Much to everyone's delight, snow starts falling all over the world. But as it piles up, the charm quickly wears off. And by the time the Earth is covered in three miles of packed snow, everyone is too dead to complain.

Roberts follows the snowfall from start to finish - the early days of panic, the boredom and the pain of captivity and then the fledgling society that emerges on the other side. With only 150,000 survivors around the world, the human race is a very different entity (and a very cold one). The attempts to rebuild society are awkward - people must choose between looking forwards or finding someone to blame.

The Snow is an awkward fusion of two very different books.

The first, which explores the snow's human impact, is terrific. I've always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic thrillers, and this is a good one: even the most mundane aspects of government become tricky when you're standing on top of a pile of powder. The power politics are well-developed, as are the various players - the close-minded general, the awkward revolutionary and the scheming wife.

The novel's style, a collection of government papers, interviews and testimonials, gives this more impact. The Snow is a gathering of unreliable narrators. The reader has to work at deciphering what to believe and how the stories click together. Hard work, but rewarding.

Roberts also makes the snow's impact felt on the personal level. We understand what it is like to scrounge for food or cross a hundred-foot drift... even the joy of smoking a carefully-husbanded cigarette.

The latter part of The Snow is another book entirely. For some perverse reason, the (slightly goofy) science-fiction origin of the snowfall is explained. Not only is this explanation unnecessary, but since it is bizarre, unanticipated, and completely out of left-field, it undermines the rest of the book. What was a Ballardian thriller about human beings in adverse circumstances suddenly transforms into ponderous retro pulp.

I highly recommend The Snow for its auspiciously apocalyptic beginning. It is beautifully written and presents a fascinating take on the downfall (and tenuous resurgence) of human civilization. I also recommend it as a case study on disappointing endings. It's a valuable lesson for all science fiction authors: sometimes humans are enough.

I actually really liked this book. I liked the twist on the apocalypse theme at the beginning of the book as well as the surprising last part. It had parts throughout that were slightly irritating (the "classified documents" with deleted text), but I think that was the point. The novel went back and forth between the first person experience and portraying the collective handling of people going through a rapid, dramatic culture and climate change. As a result, it was also partially a sociopolitical exposition, with a conspiracy theory bent. I also really liked the main character! It was really refreshing for me that the protagonist was a woman of color, with a decidedly pragmatic view of relationships in the "New World" (no wishy-washy romanticism!). I found Adam Roberts' depiction of her experience as quite shrewd, especially if Adam Roberts happens to be a (white?) (male?) author.

I wanted to like The Snow. I really did.

The idea of this refreshingly different post-apocalyptic tale had great potential and the opening 50 pages were genuinely interesting, ringing faint echoes of Terry Nation's seminal "Survivors".

Then, however, following the central character Tira's rescue, the tale loses direction and gets hopelessly bogged down. I have to confess that I found neither Tira nor any of the other characters particularly likeable or engaging and, regarding the accounts of their endless politics, cumbersome characterisation and yawn-inducing relationships, I, quite frankly, couldn't give a damn.

Furthermore, Roberts' excessive use of [blank] and [expletive deleted] to express the regime of censorship under which Tira is obliged to write her journal, is immensely irritating to plough through. One chapter of this material would surely have sufficed? But no. Roberts gives us hundreds of pages of the stuff and by around page 200, I very nearly gave up.

Early on, Tira writes that "at the beginning people were happy..." then though things "became tiresome, and then oppressive, and then something worse, became calamitous". That kinda echoes how I felt waking up to realise I still had a gruelling 250 pages to read!

I persevered though and was partly rewarded by a moderately interesting twist as the closing revelations approached.

Then, though, the book merely peters out to nothing.

An opportunity lost.

Too long. Interesting start, with the planet starting to be buried in ice and the really conservative power structures starting to form with what is left of the military, and what happens to our main character when she finds herself in the middle of it.

The Less Than Zero style rambling rant shown as part of the secret censored document confession in the middle gets pretty tedious, the whole sex, drugs, Hollywood thing.

Coming out of that, it is 'bang', ok, we now find out what the conspiracy of secrets is really about, electron sheath instant moisture transport etc., it ain't.