Jonathan Yeager has just finished a tour working for a private defence contractor, protecting VIPs visiting Baghdad - in plainer terms, a mercenary - when he is recruited for a secret mission in Africa. Operation Guardian is to seek out and kill a group who may be infected by a deadly virus but its members are also given the strange instruction to kill on sight a “living creature you’ve never seen before,” a creature which becomes immediately clear is the operation’s real target.

Kento Koga is a pharmaceutical research worker whose father, a virologist, has just died. He receives an email from his dead father asking him to look in a certain book and not to tell anyone. In there he finds an ATM card and a memo informing him about a hidden laptop of which he is never to relinquish control, an address to go to and to expect all his communications to be monitored. The building contains equipment for carrying out Organic Chemistry reactions and he is tasked with researching and synthesising an agonist for a mutant form of the protein GPR769,l to be completed within one month.

Unfortunately the prologue, which describes a meeting in the White House, dissipates any sense of mystery about the reasons for Operation Guardian as it reveals the existence of a new life form (an evolved human, or more precisely a Pygmy born into the Kanga band of Mbuti.) This may lead to the extinction of the human race and of course is seen as a threat to the US. The President here is named as Gregor S Burns but reads as an extremely thinly disguised version of George W Bush, as he ordered an invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and declared victory before the war was won.

The US security apparatus is also concerned about leaks to human rights organisations concerning extraordinary rendition (a procedure which Takano feels the need to explain to us at length.) A secondary purpose of Operation Guardian is to kill the leaker, Warren Garrett, one of its members, who wishes to intimidate President Burns into stopping rendition/torture by revealing the evidence to threaten him with a war crimes tribunal. We all know this could never really happen and like the text’s attempts to soften Yeager and the other members of the operation is rather limp. These are killers after all.

And the relationship between the two strands? Yeager’s son Justin suffers from pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis, or PAECS, which is the fatal disease caused by mutant GPR769. There are occasional passages from other points of view which are only visited the once.

Takano has characters hark on violence’s inevitability. “We project our true colours onto our enemies, fear them, and attack them. And in using violence against others, the nation and religion are the support systems that pardon our actions.” Maybe so; but, “‘War is just another form of cannibalism. Humans use their intelligence to try to hide their instinct for cannibalism,’” Really? Again, “‘Good deeds are seen as virtuous precisely because they run counter to human nature,’” which is definitely arguable. The point is in any case somewhat undermined by Koga’s determination to succeed and the members of Operation Guardian ending up protecting the creature - a three-year old named Akili.

The descriptions of the mechanics involved in undertaking Organic Chemistry are also not convincing. And a month to synthesise a chemical’s agonist from scratch - even with the help of an advanced computer programme - is more than a tall order. The violent scenes, in addition to being curiously perfunctory, read more like reportage at a remove. Then there is the skating over of the ethics of administering an untested drug (actually two drugs; an allosteric agent is also required) on human patients.

Extinction is an uneasy mix of military fiction and thriller. A work of pure SF would surely focus more on the evolved human. Granted, Akili has an undeveloped pharynx and is therefore incapable of speech (though can two-finger type.) He can factorise large numbers into their prime components so compromising the security of encrypted data and communication between computers but otherwise his agency is limited. Not so Koga’s mysterious telephonic prompter, a further link between the two main narratives.

Whether it is a consequence of translation is difficult to determine but the writing is plodding. It is also full of redundancies and meanderings of various sorts such as a disquisition on the lack of remuneration scientists receive for their endeavours. The slightest action is described, information dumping is intrusive, often ad hoc and frequently unnecessary. One phrase read, “Yeager, who’d had reconnoitring training.” Haven’t all soldiers?

As SF, Extinction is nugatory. Action thriller devotees may wish to take a look. ( )

Rasanter Roman, der unglaublich fesselt und spannend ist. Es kommen zwar zahlreiche wissenschaftliche Beschreibungen vor, aber das große Ganze ist hervorragend geschrieben. Es läßt einen nicht los ! ( )

“When human evolution occurs, we will soon vanish from the face of the earth. We will suffer the same fate that befell Peking man and the Neanderthals.”

I really tried hard to like this but I could never really get all that interested in this book. It felt far too long and I was far too bored by it. The characters were all underdeveloped and that is why I never really cared about any of them. There was a ton of science in this book and it tended to become technical and boring like this passage:

The extraction procedure isolated the nonpolar organic materials of the reaction mixture into a nonpolar organic solvent, leaving behind the unwanted polar constituents in a polar water phase.

How do you expect me to stay interested in the story, let alone awake, while reading that? There was some action in this book that I found pretty exciting but that just couldn't make up for the rest of the book.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley. ( )

The one main takeaway of Genocide of One appears to be that modern man is truly awful. The picture Mr. Takano paints of mankind is just plain ugly. In fact, his version of mankind is one step above that of primates. To make things worse, he is not gentle about descriptions of brutality. In fact, there are some of the worst scenes of cruelty one will ever read. They are stomach-churning, nightmare-inducing, explicit, vivid, and not easy to erase from one’s memory. His view is so bleak that it tends to distract a reader from the rest of the story.

As for the rest of the story, it is a mash-up of politico-science thriller and textbook. The science portions are also brutal but in a completely different manner. While the explanations are necessary given the technical details of the plot, they are not simple to understand. Filled with intricate technical jargon and advanced laboratory methods, it is not just dry but exceedingly difficult. In fact, they are the kind of scenes that will turn readers off from continuing the story because they are too technical. Nor are they well-explained. This could easily be the fault of the translation, but the fact of the matter is that these are trying scenes that test the patience of the most erudite reader.

It is not that Genocide of One is a bad story. The action is intense, and the theory it posits is rather ground-breaking. It is a story bound in negativity though, and that proves very taxing. Neither is it a pro-American novel, as it is deeply critical of American politicians and spycraft. Mr. Takano tries to end the novel on a hopeful note, but readers are so thoroughly disenfranchised that they will no longer care. In an attempt to be a cautionary tale about the presumptions of modern man, Genocide of One becomes a slog of a novel that disgusts, distracts, and disturbs rather than educates, entertains, or enlightens.