Extremophile

"The author has previously written fantasy and I think this is the first novel-length science fiction he’s published. It’s a caper, set in a climate-damaged near-future London, where a high-risk heist might save the world. Some of it is bound to go wrong and there’s a very densely imagined culture. There is an undercurrent of anger at what we are doing to our world and how corporations treat people – rather like Ned Beaumann’s Venomous Lumpsucker , which won a couple of years ago. In fact, there’s anger in a couple of the books. Again, it’s very promising work. With the success of cyberpunk forty years ago, there was a vogue for naming any new subgenre somethingpunk – steampunk , hopepunk, solarpunk and of course biopunk. It’s like every scandal having the word -gate stuck on the end. Some of the original cyberpunk stories had genetic and biological modification alongside implanted computer chips and virtual reality, but some people find it useful as a term. Your typical biopunk protagonist has modified DNA, which changes where they can live or how long they live. It might be they can photosynthesise rather than needing to eat. There’s usually a dodgy black market and corrupt multinational corporations, with quite a lot of overlap between the two. Again, that’s rather cyberpunk."