Extremophile with James Flanagan

This Book I Read...

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This month CM Lowry is talking to author James Flanagan about Extremophile by Ian Green in ‘This Book I Read…’

Topics covered include:

Extremophile is a bio-punk speculative sci-fi story written by Scottish author Ian Green, who also wrote The Gauntlet fantasy series. Extremophile is billed as a breakneck biohacking thriller set in climate-collapse London.
James’s discusses his love, and also hatred, of Extremophile!
Extremophile is, at times, hard sci-fi as it deep dives into genetics and epi-genetics and is written by a genetic scientist. That said it is balanced by lots of action and even an energetic punk gig in the middle of the book.
James shares his favourite thing about Extremophile
- The characters – they leap of the page really well – and the way that the complexity of their lives weave together the main story.
- SPOILER ALERT – James shares some specifics from the book for a couple of minutes that you might want to skip if you’re planning to read the book
James also shares some things about the book that he doesn’t like
- The idea of writing without quotation marks for dialogue – in Cormac McCarthy style. This made it incredibly difficult for James to understand whether he was reading narrative or dialogue and who was saying what.
- There are lots of different characters, with their specific points of view, and switching between those different perspectives across the course of the book can be quite difficult and also slow down the narrative.
CM Lowry asks James why people should hunt out Extremophile for a read?
- James argues that this book is something different from most sci-fi in that it isn’t a space opera or based on the usual tropes of what if we could go back in time or travel to far off planets. It’s a far more interested read
- If you’re looking for something a bit different in science fiction, then this is the one for you!
James shares some recommendations
- Extinction Code by James D Prescott, part of the Extinction Series
- Genome by A.G. Riddle, part of the Extinction Files Series
CM Lowry chats to James about his own book, Genefire. In which a PHD student discovers a message from the future, written in the DNA of a young girl which enables them to save the world.