Review of Extremophile by Ian Green

The names of a few counter-culture/beat writers from the 60s still echo—Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey among them. But the novel which captures the espirit of the era the best is perhaps Jack Kerouac's On the Road. More rhythm and melody than plotted story with waypoints, it tells of a young man who sets aside his day job to live the moment—sex, drugs, and jazz concerts. It's been thirty years since I read the novel, but I don't remember much political ideology. It's thus interesting that Kerouac's novel kept springing to mind reading Ian Green's (wildly different) Extremophile (2024).

Extremophile is cyberpunk through and through. Body augmentation, cyberspace, corporate dystopia, dark streets, hackers, loads of neon, evil CEOs, etc., etc. You're familiar with it. Charlie, punk rock bass player by night, gene artist by later night, sleeps during the day. She and her band mates enjoy carousing with fellow musicians, just as much as they enjoy mucking with the system—ecoterrorism, DNA hacking to help their friends avoid corporate watchdogs, and generally sticking their middle-finger up at the man as much as possible. When an opportunity to hit a particularly vile corporate suit comes along, the band are all over it. Trouble is, the suit has his own private security.

Green nails the cyberpunk motif without overdoing it. For people who have played the card game Android: Netrunner or video game Cyberpunk 2077, the vibes are strong. Charlie and her band mates live and breathe such a day to day existence. If neither of those games is familiar to you, then I can put it differently: Extremophile is a near-future Luis Mangione wet dream. The morals are polar opposites: green activists = good, anything corporate or government related, bad. It's anarchy—just what a punk rock, cyberpunk novel (perhaps?) should be about.

To get to Kerouac (and what might be a minor issue for some, and a perk for others). In generating momentum, Extremophile depends more on the power of scene, prose, and pace than on overarching plot devices or macguffins. The novel is more days in the life of Charlie and her bandmates as they get into trouble (and start some of their own) than it is gears within gears of narrative. Like Kerouac's On the Road, it's rhythm and melody—the mood—that grabs the reader and asks them to keep reading. Dark alleyways, shithole bars, rundown tenements, bathroom narcotics brewing—these and countless other scenes push the novel relentlessly forward, all relayed in Green's cynical, clipped voice.

This leads to one drawback: a pat climax. Charlie's adventures span the mortal to inane, but the head it all comes to feels paint-by-the-numbers. To be clear, everything else around it, including the wonderful shout out to The Departed's rodent denouement, has its own personality. The culmination of events, not so much. Over in a chapter, it's easily forgiven given the quality of tale surrounding it.

In the end, Extremophile is a short, punchy piece of cyberpunk that feels like an early Paul McAuley or Ian McDonald novel. By zero means imitation, however, Green has his own tale tell, one of punk rock activists sowing further discord in a near-future already tossed on the winds of social malaise, corporate nihilism, the anxieties of the haves and have nots, and a degrading natural landscape. To destroy is easier than to create, and Charlie and her crew love every spanner throwing moment of their near-future punk rock lives. The reader will likely have just as much fun. Be sure to check your politics at the door. This is about the juke and jive.