Read: Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman

This won the Arthur C Clarke Award last year, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut? Sea of Rust? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker sounded quite good - although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well. It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The Venomous Lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered. An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally wiped out the lumpsuckers. The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a ride awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons… The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works - the billionaire’s motives donät add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless. ( )

In a not-too-distant future, a worldwide commission has created a sort of cap-and-trade system to ostensibly slow down the extinction of species while allowing human development projects to proceed. As a market-based system, an industry has developed around extinction credits that often operates to game the system. Karin Resaint is a biologist trained in animal cognition—species deemed intelligent are worth more credits in the market system. Mark Haylard is a manager in the extinction industry. They come together when Resaint is about to report the venomous lumpsucker, a cleaner fish, as intelligent and a company that Haylard is representing just inadvertently destroyed what may be their only remaining breeding grounds. From there Resaint and Haylard are bound in an escapade to find another population of the venomous lumpsucker—Resaint because she cares about the species, Haylard because of investments he’s made. Over the course of their encounters with quirky characters and futuristic reserves, detention camps, and an artificial island of sorts, the value of species and the meaning of individual species’ extinction, as well as the definition of extinction itself, are brought to the fore. I am with Resaint: “And yet, despite all that, it was self-evident to Resaint that [a parasitoid wasp species] had some sort of inherent value. How could this brilliant, intricate, hilarious thing—the fluke result of an unrepeatable process, the legacy of some dizzying number of past individuals, all of them, in hindsight, striving unconsciously toward a single invention—not be valuable in itself.” This is a clever, entertaining story with some depth and complex characters. ( )

Pretty perfect from start to finish. Everything Beauman invents is plausible, from the political constructs, to the biology, to the tech, to the characters, and he makes great use of them all to tell a story that feels very real, very thoughtful, and so entertaining. Everything rings true. Humorous and horrifying at once, I hope nothing in it comes to pass, but I have a feeling it all very well might. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/venomous-lumpsucker-by-ned-beauman/

A vicious yet funny satire on global politics and the environmental crisis, sort of Kim Stanley Robinson but with sæva indignatio added. It’s mostly set in a near-future Europe from which Britain is (mostly) absent; the role played by the Brits become slowly apparent along with much else that is hinted at in early chapters. Written with passion and confidence, and you’ll be thinking of it for ages. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/10/2023151-venomous-lumpsucker-ned-beauman.h... ( )