Synopsis
Charlie and Parker are punks by night, biohackers by day, living in the stuttering decay of near-future climate-collapse London.
They pay for the beer they don’t steal with money from their sketchy astronomy site Zodiac Code, while Charlie’s bio-bespoke augments equip the criminals, punks, and eco-warriors of London.
They have to deal with disgruntled clients, scene kids who don’t dig their band, and a city that’s run by corporates and criminals.
When a group of Green activists hire them for a series of jobs ranging from robbery to murder, Charlie wants to walk away. But Parker still believes they can make a difference, and urges her to accept.
As they enter an escalating biological arms race against faceless corporations, amoral biohackers, and criminal cyberpunks, Charlie will have to choose what she believes in. Is there still hope, and does she have a right to grab it?
Review
If Trainspotting and Fight Club had a cyberpunk baby, it would grow up to be Extremophile. It’s unabashedly punk, a heavy guitar riff of a book that’ll make the rebel side of your brain chant and cheer at full, ear-splitting volume.
Biopunk is having a bit of a moment right now, and rightly so. There’s so much new ground to explore in the potential of genetics and bio-engineering, and if you’ve got any doubt of that, then this book will definitely put those doubts to rest. It rides the line between intriguing and outrageous, plausible and wild, and it does so without missing a beat.
The absolute highlight of the book, for me, is its characters. Four primary points of view are straddled, with Charlie filling the role of protagonist. Charlie’s awesome. She rocks. It’s as simple as that. She mods out her friends and engages in high stakes espionage-like heists for secretive corporations on the side, all while pursuing her main passion in life — playing in her punk rock band. If you don’t instantly fall in love with Charlie, then you might need to retune your imagination a few notches.
But Extremophile isn’t content to just sit back and settle for having one excellent character. Instead, it gives us three more voices that are so diverse and different from each other that I’m still flabbergasted at how Ian Green has managed to pull it off. It’s got everything from the poetic journey of a biologically altered girl who escapes underground mines and emerges into the real world, to a psychopathic villain who is one of the most dastardly, inhuman scientists I’ve encountered in fiction. But the absolute best of the bunch is the insane, egotistic, and out of control Scrimshank — a force of nature that can’t be summed up in words. He’s not just dialled up to eleven, eleven is dialled up to him. Your jaw will drop every time his chapters come around at the sheer bombast of his personality, and how unhinged he is from any sense of reality. He’s like a living, breathing Carlsberg commercial — ‘Carlsberg don’t write book characters, but if they did, they’d probably be the best book characters in the world.’ You won’t trust him. You won’t like him. But you won’t want to stop reading about him.
What’s so great about the sheer diversity of the voices in this book is the emotional beats it throws at you. One minute, you’re laughing, the next — you’re reaching for your hankies to wipe away a tear. There’s such a rich tapestry of emotions that hits you in the feels, it provides a really satisfying experience from beginning to end, swinging you one way and then another, until it leaves you exactly in the place you should be.
Plot-wise, there’s a top-notch structure to the book as Charlie moves from heist to heist, trying to complete a ridiculous mission without getting caught. The whole time, you’re trying to figure out what the overriding agenda is, and why certain strings are being pulled. It all fuses together in a thrilling way. And as far as comeuppances go, this has got some absolute classics in the way it twists and turns.
It engages every sense. Taste. Sound. Smell. Especially smell — you’ll know the scene when you get to it. But some of the most luscious and rewarding scenes are the ones where Charlie is just rocking out with her band or playing a concert. You’ll feel synergised with the characters and music in such a way that you can close your eyes and almost hear the bass.
Stylistically, it’s got literary sensibilities, while also being completely filthy. If you don’t enjoy reading swear words, then this isn’t the book for you. But it’s so much more than just a load of profanity thrown at the page. There are layers and depth and allegory and meaning and all that good stuff to feed your imagination, and you won’t ever look at a dandelion in quite the same way, and that’s a good thing. Trust me.
Sci-fi doesn’t come more extreme than this. I absolutely loved the sheer outrageousness of this excellently paced, immersive biopunk delight. It’s got such a brilliant atmosphere, and the future it imagines is complex and gritty, but most of all — it’s fun. Sure, it’s poignant and beautiful and all of those other things, but the smile on your face will outlast the questions it leaves you pondering. What more could you ask from a book than that?
Excellent review, a superb book with very accurate genetic science, and with a glimmer of positivity for the end……
Absolutely. That ending — I reread it a couple of times to let it sink in. Loved that last chapter