Book Review: Extremity by Nicholas Binge

 

Extremity by Nicholas Binge

176 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication: September 16, 2025 by Tordotcom

 

I should state right off the bat that I root for every book I open to read. Binge had a huge hit on his hands with Ascension. He got a blurb from Stephen King, and he is translated into nine languages. Frankly, he has more success than me, so keep that in mind. He has incredible ideas, and I understand the appeal.  The thing is that I was challenged by Ascension. I loved the concept, but didn’t jive with the execution. The narrative was set up to be epistolary, a narrative limitation that Binge didn’t follow and apparently no editor along the way told him he was only writing like it was a letter to start chapters.   

Extremity is a book that I think has a fantastic set-up, but much like the first Binge I read, I could not jive with the writing style. 

Reviews tend to be extremely personal, as a reader, we all have things that will instantly turn us off to a reading experience, and for me, it can often be first-person narratives. Not always, there are plenty of first-person narratives I do enjoy. Often, those books cause me to forget about how the story is told. It might be a writer’s disease that most readers will not look deeply into. 

First Person is like found footage movies to me. Found footage movies often “break the rules” of the story by doing things like having a running camera set down in a room while people have a private conversation. If you are doing a first-person book, then you have to in my opinion follow the rules and not cheat. Delores Claiborne by King and Malerman’s Incidents Around the House are examples of first-person done perfectly without cheating. 

Nicholas Binge seems intent on using first person but unwilling to accept the limitations of the form.  I can’t suspend disbelief when the POV shifts between first-person narrators, because I start wondering why this person is telling the story now. It shines a spotlight on the wizard behind the curtain constantly, and I am seeing Binge’s motivations, not the characters.  

For him to switch narrators, he had to use the device of starting each point of view shift in a character's name in bold, because a reader wouldn’t know which I was telling the story. If you want a three POV story, in my opinion, it is a bad idea to do it this way. 

Now If that doesn’t bother you, and you think I am being a harsh asshole, let me tell you that Extremity is a high-concept time travel novel combined with police procedural and a bit of cosmic horror. The concept at the core is cool. The execution did not work for me.    

As an example, I will point to page 36-37

“Mark!” Julia shouts, sprinting at full tilt from the other side of the room. The girl darts away, escaping back off into the house with the rifle.

Julia grabs my gun and follows.

I try to get up, but my brain’s in shock all I can think about is the muzzle of that rifle directly in front of my eyes.”

OK, a few things...this passage ends Mark’s POV, and we switch to Julia. In a third-person narrative, I accept the author’s choice of transition. But when it is First person, I am thinking why did Mark stop telling the story with a gun in his face?

Julia Torrimsen: I knew Paul's house like the back of my hand, and by the way the shooter was moving through it, she did too. This is how Julia’s POV starts…

“I followed her left out of the back living room and into the library.”

I see why Binge is withholding POV, and giving us information. Mark was knocked out and John was going to think Julia did it. So then, before the chapter ended, he had to switch POVS again.  This is one example, but the short novel is littered with moments. Are they writing this story? Co-authors? Are they giving testimony? Why these three voices?

Sometimes they are talking to the reader, and other times not. So lets talk about when the characters talk directly to the reader. Sometimes they stay in character but often they tell the story like a novelist, which took me out of Ascension, and it took me out of the story here too.

A shame because there are interesting ideas at work. I like the idea that a time machine becomes one of the worst possible inventions.

“The great machine of our doom. The greatest invention of our time period, the last thing humanity will ever create.”

The stakes of the story are powerful, and I was interested in where it was going, so I finished it despite all my problems with it. Maybe the first-person thing doesn’t bother you, and there is a chance that this time-travel cosmic horror police procedural will work for you. It has much going for it. I wish I could say I loved it, but I gotta be honest. Binge and I have different storytelling approaches but I am sure it will work better for many of you. I don’t personally think he is being served well by editors  

Lord Running Calm's review of my novel Great America in Dead World

 

 Lord Running Clam is the author of Pink Beam: A Philip K. Dick Companion and long time organizer of the Philip K. Dick Festival.

GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD by David Agranoff (QUOIR 2025) – a brief review by LRC

              This novel was controversial before publication because it employs a method of construction based on a letter by Philip K. Dick circa 1964 in which PKD describes how he wrote his own novels at that time. David Agranoff has turned PKD’s dashed-off letter to Ron Goulart into a formula which he has applied to many of Dick’s novels to see if they align roughly with Dick’s words in this letter. He finds they do and with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD he uses the formula (Dick’s letter) to write a novel of his own. A literary experiment, if you will. So, how’d it go?

              Kai Dame, our heroine, spends her days as a ‘Janie’ tending to people, mostly old people, while they rest in their pods at their homes and spend as much of their lives as possible in a massive online world known as Great America where they can be young again. Kai, herself, is always playing a never-ending online game the object of which is to kill lone wolf mass murderers chosen from a large database of real-life events. Success in the game supplies credit towards her goal of affording to pay for the best immersive experience possible: Great World Plus. While doing her daily duties cleaning the waste and supplying Foodle to the oldster’s pods, her online avatar keeps her game and other online activities going. A common practice and nobody knows if they’re communicating with a real person or their online avatar.

              In the real world things are not good despite the affirmations  of President Supreme and his lackeys that America is Great Again. Daily temperatures are over 100 F in Los Angeles and the populace stays cool by aid of built-in tech augments. And, of course, the ecosystem is mostly destroyed and people rely on a product called Foodle to survive. Random mass shootings are commonplace and the people, helpless in the face of worldwide disaster, turn more and more to their online lives. And when President Supreme offers Heaven for the Living – a new totally convincing world simulation, the populace, unsurprisingly enough, goes for it. The only problem is it is very expensive and requires each person to have their brain removed and placed in a Brain Box to be connected to the simulation. Here, by immersion in nutrient fluids the brains live on while the personality is transferred into the sim.

              Kai hooks up with Nick, a rich old man whose family want him to go to Heaven with them. But he’s balking, he lives in the bad air-conditioned real world and is afraid to give it up. It is Kai’s job to persuade him to agree to his family’s wishes.

              Meanwhile, Kai’s avatar – her ‘aver’ – is more and more taking on a life of its own, doing things she may or may not want done.

              She meets Roger Greenstone, a high official in the permanent regime of President Supreme and a member of Nick’s family. Greenstone, a person about as morally void as one might suppose you could find, is tasked by the president to solve the problem of the failing Foodle supply from Canada. But, he, too, is looking forward to life in the new Heaven sim. He’s eager to go because he knows the Foodle supply is failing and who wants to tell President Supreme that?

              As to how it all ends, I recommend reading the book which includes a handy Glossary and Afterword by the author.

              There’s a lot going on here and Agranoff applies PKD’s formula as he sees it to good effect. As he states in his Afterword, he tried to write as if PKD himself lived in our present time of 2025 and looked around at the world as it is now and wrote a science fiction novel.  

              Not an easy task but Agranoff is a confident writer and launches himself on his journey to sort it all out PKD-style. It works! But differently, somehow; Philip K. Dick is all over this novel and it is fun noting all the names and references. Reading through PKD’s 1964 letter to Ron Goulart (unfortunately not included in the book) and comparing with GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD you can see how this novel does follow the letter in its own structure. I’ve made no detailed comparison and see Agranoff’s novel as an exciting experiment: a probe into the nature of Philip K. Dick’s style that can only benefit all those who study this great writer. I don’t know if David Agranoff has written or talked about how he handled the multiplicity of problems he faced while writing the book, and this is something he will likely do soon. I look forward to the discussion.

              When I began reading GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD (Ags does have a way with titles!) it reminded me of William Gibson’s NEUROMANCER in that both novels extrapolate from then and now current technologies: circa 1980 and 2025 – but in reverse. GREAT AMERICA IN DEAD WORLD reads like a forerunner to NEUROMANCER in that it projects now technology in a way that establishes the nuts and bolts, as it were, of Gibson’s Sprawl. I need to expand on this notion but not here and now.

              Every novel, no matter its structure, is a thing in itself and stands alone. Its excellence lies in the reading experience. Agranoff’s novel is a good read. I read lots of books all at the same time and it is rare that I make it through one without picking up another and reading more there. But, this is a fun straight-ahead story and I rushed through it and, indeed, couldn’t put it down! PKD inspired for sure and a good plot that explores current technological developments in a quasi-PKD way. It also impels a closer look by PKD scholars into how he planned his own novels.

              David Agranoff is to be commended for this experiment.

n  Lord Running Clam, Ward, Colorado July, 2025

Book Review: The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed

 

 

The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed 272 pages, Paperback Published June 3, 2025 by Podium Publishing “Separated by ten thousand years, a team of scientists and their test subject must work together to save the human species―before it’s too late . . .” This one came totally out of the blue to my mailbox. I was offered an arc of this novel at some point, and I remember saying I would check it out. I am currently ass deep in my own novel so by the time I opened the package I forgot what interested me in the first place. Perfect for me as I love reading a novel with zero idea of what it is even about. Back cover descriptions can often lead you to expectations. I really didn’t know a thing. Tim Weed is also not an author whom I don’t know, so I had no reputation to go on either.  I came to this book not expecting much, but I was hopeful.  I have no idea if Tim Weed is a science fiction guy, if this is one of many SF projects, or a one-off environmental novel.I don’t know clearly what the mission statement was, but I got the distinct impression that this novel was not written by someone with a library of SF titles.  Strangely, TAP could be an intense response or a subversion of a sacred sci-fi subgenre, “The Generation Ship novel.”  One of the best Science fiction novels of this century so far was a novel with the same mission. While I think Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson is a better novel expressing the same point, I am not insulting TAP; it is a daring original novel at the same time.  I don’t want to spoil Aurora, so if you have not read it (and you should), then skip ahead.  In that novel, a generation ship goes out from a dying Earth to travel to the nearest star system, and discovers that there is no life available on this other world, so they head back to Earth, hoping that it has regenerated over the decades.  Both novels question the viability of the Generation ship, but in Weed’s story, it never gets off the ground. Despite failing to get off earth, the project retains the name Centuri project, the generation ship is buried underground, and the survivors of humanity (this is not big spoiler) are intended to sleep through a post-human recovery.  The Afterlife Project doesn’t feel like it was written by a Science fiction scenester, but it is a good science fiction novel, it just doesn’t feel like a retread or cookie cutter. It is a good thing.  It is hard to spoil because of the way the narrative shifts from the birth of the Centuri project during the fall of Earth, and eons after the fall, with the results. The back and forth makes for an interesting way to tell this story. We know the end of one of the narratives, but the essence of this novel is the why.   So what makes this story special? First off, the novel comments on all of civilization.  “The simple idea that everything he's ever known could have been so fully erased by the passage of time, computers, smartphones, the Internet. Social media, Hollywood movies, any movies. The Stock Exchange, McDonald's and Starbucks, Coca-Cola, kombucha, NASA, plug-in hybrids, rock'n'roll, jazz. The Roman calendar. Days of the week. Politics. Blueberry scones. Every invention, every creation of the human society he had once known, not to mention his family and friends, and Natalie and the rest of the Centauri team. Everyone he'd ever admired, everyone he had ever scorned, all the human beings he'd ever met, and the multitudes he never did. All of them, banished and expunged. Never to be revisited, except in memory. It was a lot to take in.” It is a lot to take in, and that is one of the things that makes this a thoughtful and enjoyable experience. The above passage shows that the novel carefully considers the weight of what this story represents. It's about the folly of civilization, and one possible way we might survive it. The book is directly speaking to future humans who have a chance to rebuild, but of course, it is directly speaking to us.  “If you are reading this, I hope you have a more generous capacity to forgive your fellow humans than I do and that you will teach your children and grandchildren that there is a better way to live.” One smart thing is that Weed doesn’t assume the beings in possession of this story will read the same language. “If you can't read these words, I presume your attention will be drawn to the graphic representations in the accompanying codex. If you can read these words, then it is my hope you now understand that we have tried our best, and perhaps we're not quite done trying yet. Approximately seven decades before I completed these pages a scientist by the name of James E Lovelock proposed the idea of the last book on earth, a user's guide to living sustainably on this planet after the fall of human civilization. Our version of Doctor Lovelock's idea the codexs that accompanies this one begins with illustrations detailing the factors that led to this fall and continues with some important discoveries made by the species during our first flourishing on this planet. Continuing in graphic form, we include detailed instructions intended to provide a future population you my futuristic friends, whom I address across the gap of however much time may have passed with knowledge that should help you to avoid making the same mistakes we did with humble affection and great hope for our mutual successes…” We don’t get to be these future friends, and the only way to survive is to listen to warnings like these and act. The Afterlife Project is a powerful environmental novel, and first and foremost I felt that way about it. It uses Science Fiction to make a powerful statement about civilization and our desperate need to come to terms with the one and only planet we have.