Synopsis:
As World War III rages, the scientists in Antarctica are thankful for the isolation – until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base. In their truck is a dead body, the first murder in Antarctica. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don’t know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body…
Within seventy-two hours, thirteen others lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength. An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. It is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously, the beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.
Exhausted by suspicion and fear, with rescue impossible for months, the desperate crew members turn on each other. A small group of survivors try to resist the siren call of the growing hive mind and stay alive long enough to solve the mystery of the symbiotic microbe’s origins. But the symbiote is more than a disease – it is a biological weapon that can change the balance of power in a time of war.
The survivors cannot let anyone infected make it to the summer season, when planes will arrive to take them – and potentially the symbiote – back to civilization.
Review:
Symbiote first caught my attention with the “extremophile parasite” description (I’m a microbiologist outside of the book world, so stuff like that always piques my interest.) But so much of this book also reminded me of the X-Files (specifically the arctic black oil/alien virus episodes.) I loved the X-Files, and when the very first chapter of this book had all those vibes, I knew I was going to like the rest.
Symbiote is one of those books that once things start to go bad, they go really, really bad. And just when I thought the limit to the craziness was maxed out, another level of WTF was added. It’s fast-paced, brutal, and in some aspects, downright terrifying. Between the parasitic microbes, the setting on the South Pole during Antarctic winter, the scarily-realistic political powerplays going on, and the need for survival at all costs, it’s a wild book from start to finish. The drive to survive isn’t just portrayed from the human perspective in this book, either. The reader gets to experience it a bit from the microbe point of view too.
Speaking of the microbes… I go into books and movies with the mindset of suspending disbelief most of the time (unless they’re labeled as hard sci-fi. This one wasn’t.) While extremophile microbes do exist, and some have even been found on Antarctica, there were some elements to those in the book that were 100% works of fiction. I’m not dinging the author for that—I read this to be entertained, and Symbiote did its job there. I’m just mentioning this for the sake of other readers: the microbes’ ability to swarm/fly through the air to find new hosts is completely fictional. The skin-to-skin transmission is plausible, however, and has been documented countless times in the real world.
And the telepathy… Some bacteria have a mechanism called quorum sensing that allows them to communicate with each other. It has been a number of years since I last looked into the latest science about it, but back then, we didn’t fully understand how it worked. If the author was leaning on quorum sensing as the basis for the telepathy, I can totally get behind that. (And if it was a happy accident, that’s cool too.)
Overall, Symbiote was a super fun read. If you’re a fan of horror/horror-adjacent sci-fi, definitely check it out.
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