Book Review: EXTREMOPHILE by Ian Green
Probably the most batshit book I've read since Into the Miso Soup.
Head of Zeus, 2024
Her skin shimmers and the lines flicker under the buzzing light, first a silver sheen, then a pulsing vibrant red. It takes me a moment to realise my shock – I’ve seen plenty more garish displays. But this isn’t glitz fabric, or a silicone body mask, or some filigree of translucent exotic material, or a tattoo with embedded silicone beads with frequency controlled fluorophores. This is biology – this is real.
Can’t get this anywhere else, Renault is saying to the crowd, double dragon exhaling his cigarette smoke from his nostrils to accentuate his point. This is genuine engineered squid chromatophores, totally tailored to her genome.
It’s two decades ago. I’m in a decaying room in a squat somewhere in London with my hardcore band Kill the Lights, shedding my bodyweight in sweat. Around me, Sean, Chris, Ross and Mat are thrashing hell-for-leather to a raucous crowd who seem to know the lyrics. They probably don’t (and neither do I), but who cares? Everyone’s trying to avoid the massive hole in the floor to one side of the stage.
EXTREMOPHILE (it deserves to be capitalised) is the literary equivalent of that gig. Two of the novel’s protagonists play in a band with energy not too dissimilar to my old one, except none of us are genius-level biohackers. What follows is a mind-bogglingseries of heists carried out by the most unlikely bunch of misfits in a terrifyingly plausible version of London, reminiscent of Paolo Bacigalupi’s multiple-award-winning climate tale, The Windup Girl(Orbit, 2010).
Except everything is turned up to 11 – nay – 12.
This book is intense, and it took me a few sittings to get through it. Green has written one of the most memorable ensembles I’ve ever read in a book: Charlie, Parker, Mole, Scrimshank, Zoot, Chef and Ghost leap out from the pages for the sole purpose of dragging you head first into an authoritarian world populated by corporate-sanctioned hyper-violence, and the all-too-human resistance which stands against it.
It’s one hell of a ride, and Party rules apply.
A nice edition of Extremophile can be bought on The Broken Binding’s website.
This review originally appeared in Dispatch Edition #2.
The Dispatch is a monthly roundup by British speculative fiction writer, Jordan Acosta. News, short reviews and more, published every first Thursday. You can subscribe at jordanacosta.co, and read previous editions, here.
