Book review: the World in Winter

One of the "catastrophe" novels that seemed to be around in my childhood; he also has "Death of Grass", and I have "The Drowned World" by Ballard on my reading pile.

This one dates from 1962 and is imbued with attitudes from the time, in particular English attitudes towards the former Empire. The catastrophe - declining temperatures caused by declining solar insolation leading to a New Ice Age - is an early version of Global Cooling, with an unusually rapid proposed onset. Most of the "early worry" in the book is driven by satellite measurements, which seems rather premature for 1962 (see-also Petersen, Connolley and Fleck). Amusingly it pre-dates by one year the long cold winter of 1963.

The suddenness of the onset is of course difficult to credit; but even given that there are lots of other weirdness: one can believe that jolly old Blighty would struggle, but France surely could retreat to the mediterranean coasts, southern Spain would be fine, Greece ditto, the USA could flee into Florida, north Oz would be fine, and so on; but this is not a geographically realistic book, he has a plotline and only follows England. 

Consider the - fictional of course - contrast with Helliconia Winter where the northerners plan to survive five centuries of total darkness by fishing.

The whites getting their comeuppance from the blacks in the slums of Nigeria plotline is perhaps inevitable but feels a bit crude. Minor point - it would have taken too much text to flesh out perhaps - once Our Hero is rescued from the terrible slums and reclaims his natural part of the upper echelons, he makes no attempt to help those who like him were trapped in poverty; he never thinks of them again.