A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.
Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. …
A dark and witty story of environmental collapse and runaway capitalism from the Booker-listed author of The Teleportation Accident.
The near future. Tens of thousands of species are going extinct every year. And a whole industry has sprung up around their extinctions, to help us preserve the remnants, or perhaps just assuage our guilt. For instance, the biobanks: secure archives of DNA samples, from which lost organisms might someday be resurrected . . . But then, one day, it’s all gone. A mysterious cyber-attack hits every biobank simultaneously, wiping out the last traces of the perished species. Now we’re never getting them back.
Karin Resaint and Mark Halyard are concerned with one species in particular: the venomous lumpsucker, a small, ugly bottom-feeder that happens to be the most intelligent fish on the planet. Resaint is an animal cognition scientist consumed with existential grief over what humans have done to nature. Halyard is an exec from the extinction industry, complicit in the mining operation that destroyed the lumpsucker’s last-known habitat.
Across the dystopian landscapes of the 2030s—a nature reserve full of toxic waste; a floating city on the ocean; the hinterlands of a totalitarian state—Resaint and Halyard hunt for a surviving lumpsucker. And the further they go, the deeper they’re drawn into the mystery of the attack on the biobanks. Who was really behind it? And why would anyone do such a thing?
Virtuosic and profound, witty and despairing, Venomous Lumpsucker is Ned Beauman at his very best.
This is a bleak and satirical look into one possible future that seems all too real, but also still kind of hilarious, as our two main characters bounce around the world looking for any remaining examples of the Venomous Lumpsucker fish while encountering every kind of corporate strangeness that the concept of "environmental credits" has spawned. (Environmental credit: a parody of carbon credits such that you need at least three of them to be allowed to cause the extinction of a species during a project; seven if its proven to above a certain intelligence threshold.)
Content warning
Review contains minor plot spoilers
This book won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2023 and it's very well deserved.
Set not very many years at all in our future, the book deals with the effects of the ongoing and escalating mass extinction of species on our planet due to climate change and other manmade activities. The author uses the opportunity to make some sharp and well-placed digs at many targets, from carbon offsetting to tech billionaires, and like any good satire it's sometimes too close for comfort.
I've seen other reviews describe the plot as complicated, but I honestly didn't think that was the case at all. The eco-science concepts are well explained and make perfect sense, and the occasional important tech plot point is easy to grasp as well.
The main characters are well-rounded - there are no absolute shades of good or bad in this book, just like in real life. And the writing, although never dumbed down, is snappy and interesting and keeps you turning the pages.
