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.

Also writes for Private Eye and hosts their Page 94 podcast (which is infuriatingly infrequent in episodes.)

You can also see him on stage in the West End. Quite the talented chap.

https://www.austentatiousimpro.com/cast/

I met him while on opposing teams on the BBC's Only Connect show. Excellent chap. We beat his "QI Elves" team, (which then beat the team that beat us...).

And a de-facto voice-double to Stephen Mangan if he wanted to, I swear I can never distinguish the two on the radio.

Random anecdote: I used to work with a Stephen Mangan voice-elganger!

I try not to post reddit-like comments like this, but found it strange that there are other people out there who sound like this.

I've only ever listened to the podcast.

Giving these familiar voices faces did uncomfortable things to my brain.

I once went to a live podcast recording after having listened to the hosts for ~300hr without knowing what they looked like. It's hard to describe how uncanny it was. It was sort of like watching a movie with poorly dubbed dialogue.

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?)

> I also subscribe in a very self-interested way to the School of Disbelief Suspension, and hoping the reader will meet me halfway. I was trying to write a world where you can absolutely believe it, once you have accepted the enormous and unlikely sci-fi premise.