Andrew Hunter Murray on dystopias

Andrew Hunter Murray is also a researcher for QI, and co-host of the related and very entertaining podcast No Such Thing as a Fish.

The sunlit side of the earth is far too hot to inhabit in many places - the ‘Coldside’ is uninhabitable in just the opposite way. Life clings on in a narrow, sunlit ring - a kind of Goldilocks Zone

It's an interesting book, and a fun read. It's not hard sf, but he has done a good job of imagining plausible consequences for his one "what if". It's simultaneously a good read for the physical consequences (hot zone, water levels, food supply) but also political (fragility of democracy) and personal (navigating mysteries, distrust, zero-sum situations). He's a competent writer and this was a well-executed novel. (Surprisingly so given it was his first)

> The Last Day is a story set a few decades from now in a world like our own but with one catastrophic and enormous difference

Do you need a catastrophic difference to get a dystopia? This works as well for me:

> The Last Day is a story set a few decades from now in a world like our own.

How could a stray planet(oid?) possibly affect the rotational momentum of the Earth enough to stop it from rotating entirely? That seems like the kind of physics gaffe that would give me a tyrescreech.wav end to my suspension of disbelief.

(Kind of like in Three Body where the sun is described as having a... crust? Which keeps the hot gases contained within it? And if punctured will spray a jet of solar plasma strong enough to cook planets out into space?)