Extremophile

“They want to play free market capitalism, we play free market fucking capitalism. See how their bottom line looks with a gunshot in it.”

This was a great little book. The pacing was fantastic, the voices of each character were really strong, and the themes and plot were powerful and hopeful.

I stormed through Extremophile, going “one more chapter” every night until I stayed up a bit too late, pulling it out in lulls at work, just wanting to find out what happens next. I think part of this was the way it was written: it’s a very maximalist style of writing. It doesn’t use one word where a paragraph will do and I love that. The description was evocative and full of metaphor, always illuminating the setting. There are no speech marks in the book, which pulls you into the head of each character, and which makes some scenes feel fast and frantic. It makes others feel intimate and revealing. I’ve read books which have used similar gimmicks around speech but never to such powerful effect.

I liked the characters and believed in their relationships. Even side characters felt rounded and bright, well-suited to their roles. When a side character is killed near the end of the book, I felt a twinge — I had hoped he would make it out alive. The different points of view were well-differentiated, each character having their own speech and thought patterns, which was very effective. Also, none were the weakest link. Often in a multi-POV book one POV is weaker than the others and you find yourself wishing you could skip and get to the next bit. Not so here. Each time we moved to a new POV character there was a good reason for it, that change never felt arbitrary.

The plot was a little incestuous (this person happens to know this person) but it’s set in a subculture of London-based biohackers so it didn’t quite strain credulity. Everything tied together well and felt satisfying when wrapped up. I liked the themes of community, of how far you’re willing to go for your beliefs, of the use of nihilism and optimism. It felt to me a good reflection of hyper-Holocene Britain overtaken by corporations and private venture. The rest of the world is hinted at through throwaway comments (“what’s left of the US”), there’s no comfortable and boring exposition about what happened. Global warming. And then some. Let’s get on with things.

Ultimately I would absolutely recommend Extremophile to people who enjoy sci-fi and cyberpunk genres. It’s a hopeful story about fun, silly sci-fi nonsense and about human communities and how they keep us sane.

Biopunk romantic dystopia - the genre lives!

I've read more than a few of these this year—is this a movement? A genre? A coinkydink?

Anyway, set in a rapidly chaos ascendant London, full of biomodded, jacked-in, punk musicians and kitchen sink scientists, the shifting voices of Extremophile shine a light on the local and the global, the problems of our currently suffering Earth extrapolated to a world of extremities: the haves with everything, the have-nots with what they can eke out from a world slowly going to the dogs.

At the heart of the novel are Charlie and Parker, an unbreakable duo in music, biohacking and life. Thanks to well-timed drops of backstory, the threats from past, present and future coalesce into a series of heists and adventures that hum and explode with thrills and spills. The ensemble cast around them is well-defined too, allies, enemies and strangers alike given their time in the sun, fully realised people with other lives, other concerns, but coming into focus in Charlie and Parker's odyssey at just the right moment.

With each chapter alternating between voices, each still manages to contribute to the tapestry of history, violence and revenge, building up to a final chapter narrated by the very extremophile in the title, filled with hope and a happy ending of sorts.

Four and a half stars, so five really.

The setting is a dystopian London in the 2070s or so. Climate change has wreaked havoc on the environment, central government has weakened and splintered, big corporates are stronger than ever, biotec has evolved to scary levels, and AI is closer than ever to self awareness. Our heroes are young people trying to find hope in a hostile world that reminds them again and again how hopeless everything is. They grab at every opportunity to try something new, from playing music that excites them, through little daily joys, and, finally, to making an effort to make big change happen, even if the chances of it working are limited.

The book is a masterpiece - perhaps the best thing I read this year. It sits somewhere between Stephenson's Snow Crash, Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Vandermeer's Veniss Underground, and Hamilton's Mindstar Rising. All of this is suffused with the author's great gift at storytelling. The richness of worldbuilding is astounding - there are so many ideas that the mind boggles. While not at the same level of sophistication as Brunner's The Sheep Loop Up, it's definitely in the same neighbourhood. The story is almost frantic in its energy levels. The characters are all complex, multi layered, and emotionally rich. The narrative is compelling, interesting, and, more than anything, has a bigger picture message about our environment, the need for hope (even when the struggle might be futile), and the importance of not giving up.

I absolutely loved it. I recommend highly to any fan of the authors I mention above, and anyone looking for a dose of hyper intelligent dystopian cyberpunk. I recognise that it's not an easy read for some (neither are Stephenson, Vandermeer and Brunner, to be fair), but those readers who like this sort of thing would absolutely adore this book.

My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this book in return for an honest review.